Education Still Needs Artificial Intelligence to Support Personalized Motor Skill Learning: Aikido as a Case Study

Motor skill learning is hardly considered in current AIED literature. However, there are many learning tasks that require consolidating motor tasks into memory through repetition towards accurate movements, such as learning to write, to draw, to play a musical instrument, to practice a sport technique, to dance, to use sign language or to train for surgery. The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) needs new sap to cope with the challenges in the Educational (ED) domain aimed to support psychomotor learning. This new sap can be provided by novel interactive technologies around the Internet of the Things that deal with Quantified-self wearable devices, 3D modelling, Big Data processing, etc. The paper aims to identify opportunities and challenges for AI + ED that can be discussed during the workshop. Some of the issues raised are illustrated within a case study instantiated in the Aikido practice, a defensive martial art that involves learning skilled movements by training both the body and the mind, and which is not only part of extra-curricular activity in many schools, but has also been reported of value for teaching in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education, in particular, some laws of mechanics.