Piloting “Lingnan Genius” : An AI Robot to Engage Students’ Learning in Law Courses

The paper aims to present the reasons, experiences and recommendations from piloting an Artificial Intelligence technology – a robot named ‘Lingnan Genius’ to engage students learning in law courses in both undergraduate and postgraduate studies. A human-like robot named “Lingnan Genius” was used in legal courses for a pilot. By designing educational content and then programming and utilizing Lingnan Genius with the support and efforts of the Teaching and Learning Center of Lingnan University to demonstrate sound legal cases to students through role-play in the classroom, students’ learning motivation of knowledge was enhanced. When citing many court cases in classroom, Lingnan Genius did role-play activities with the lecturer and it mimicked real human facial expression and human dialogues based on the fact that it is proficient in many languages. After using Lingnan Genius in classroom, students are more engaged into class activities, such as active responses to the questions asked by Lingnan Genius instead of lecturer, and immersion into the case studies. Notably, students’ critical thinking capacity, innovative thoughts and analytical skills have been improved. The students provided positive feedback on the experience.