Education and AI in Catalonia
AI is already in the classroom, like it or not: students use it for homework and teachers to prepare lessons. The problem is where that data goes. In a school with minors, every assignment pasted into a cloud chat is a student’s information in the hands of a third party. In Barcelona and across Catalonia, teaching staff are already asking for local AI for exactly that reason, and the Catalan free software community is promoting self-hosted tools for schools.
Something similar is happening at universities, on a different scale. Campus AI centres are starting to buy their own model servers (the University of Valladolid has already put one out to tender), and many departments have GPUs that nobody has put to work.
A real case: Nuzic
Nuzic is an educational project from Barcelona that teaches music and mathematics with its own system. A general model does not know it and tends to answer with classical music theory. For Nuzic we built datasets from its materials, with step-by-step explanations, examples contrasting its system with classical theory, and conversations in both a technical and a classroom tone, and we LoRA fine-tuned an open model so the AI can explain its own musical and mathematical system. It is the same path any training centre or publisher with its own method can follow.
What it looks like day to day
A vocational training student asks at eleven at night how a sales margin is calculated, and the tutor answers with the example from his teacher’s notes, in Catalan. The teacher prepares three versions of an exercise for different levels in ten minutes. The leadership team asks what the fourth-year curriculum plan says about project assessment and gets the exact paragraph. We have already built a tutor like this for a vocational training student, with the official curriculum for the course and voice support.
How we deploy it
- Assessment. We look at your materials, the platforms you use and which student data is involved. You come away with use cases, an architecture and a fixed proposal.
- Pilot of 2 to 4 weeks. One subject or group, with your real syllabus. We measure whether the answers are correct and whether students and teachers use it.
- Production. Installation for the whole school, accounts per group, staff training and, if needed, fine-tuning a model with your method.
Catalan as a working language
Catalan schools work in Catalan, and an AI that writes it badly is no use in class. We follow the AINA project and Softcatalà closely, and we have built a Catalan vocabulary pipeline that raised the coverage of the ‘draft’ model that speeds up responses from 75.2% to 99.6%, so that Catalan is not a second-class language.
When you don’t need it
If for now you only want teachers to learn to use AI sensibly, start with training: the server can wait.