Conference

The Educational Potential of Time Travel

Everyone is familiar with mental time travel. What would have happened if I had ...? What will happen if I seize the opportunity and ...? Mental time travel has a significant influence on the development of the human brain. Understanding mental time travel as a form of knowledge representation is one of the more recent achievements in cognitive science. It is a challenge for research and development in the field of educational technologies to make use of mental time travel. The biggest challenge is to make time travel a tangible experience in educational applications. This overlaps with digital storytelling for educational purposes. Storytelling is an ancient VR technology. Digital games provide the methodological and operational framework for not only having stories told to learners, but also contributing to shape them. Storytelling is transformed into story engagement. In a time travel prevention game, learners experience the opportunity to impact fate. Experienced stories of success are a pleasure to remember and worth telling. The remembered journey through time is a form of knowledge representation, affective and, thus effective and sustainable.

The speaker

Klaus Peter Jantke is a distinguished German mathematician, computer scientist, University teacher, and academic researcher specialising in artificial intelligence, educational technology, game studies, and gamification. Born in East Berlin in 1951, he completed his Abitur in 1970 and studied mathematics at Humboldt University in Berlin, where he earned a diploma with a thesis awarded the Karl-Weierstraß Prize in 1976. He attained his PhD in 1979 with a thesis on the performance and complexity of universal methods for recognizing general-recursive functions, earning the Humboldt Prize from Humboldt University. Jantke's academic career includes becoming a full professor at the age of 35 in theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence at Technische Hochschule Leipzig. He has taught at several international universities and contributed to numerous research projects funded by German federal ministries, NATO, and other institutions. Notably, he established the competence centre for e-learning at the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence and was Germany’s first professor of computer games in 2006. His leadership roles include heading multimedia applications and children’s media departments at various institutions like Technische Universität Ilmenau and Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology. He also founded the German Games Master Class and has been a prominent keynote speaker at international conferences on digital games and virtual crimes. Since 2016, he has served as Chief Scientific Officer at ADICOM and consulted for the Sino-German Industrial Design Centre for economic cooperation development. Since May 2024, Jantke works as head of research and development with ADAMATIK in Weimar.

From Information Scarcity to Cognitive Construction: Integrating Active Learning and Artificial Intelligence in Engineering and STEM Education

The rapid emergence of generative Artificial Intelligence is transforming the epistemic landscape of education. Information retrieval —historically a major component of academic work— has become nearly instantaneous. This shift challenges traditional teaching models that were built around information scarcity, passive lectures, and assessments based primarily on written products. At the same time, it opens an unprecedented opportunity to strengthen Active Learning approaches and bring education closer to the authentic practices of scientific and engineering work.

This keynote presents an educational framework that merges Active Learning (AL) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) into a coherent pedagogy (AL+AI) designed for modern STEM and engineering education. In this approach, students work collaboratively on carefully curated activity scripts that begin with concrete cases —experiments, datasets, design problems— and guide learners toward conceptual abstraction. AI is used openly as a tool for rapid information retrieval, numerical exploration, code generation, and hypothesis formulation. Crucially, AI outputs are never treated as authoritative: they become starting points for systematic verification, discussion, and conceptual refinement using curated course materials and peer interaction.

The framework reframes the role of the instructor—from information provider to architect of learning environments and epistemic verification processes —and promotes evaluation methods that are compatible with AI-rich environments, such as oral defenses, group reasoning sessions, and authentic project-based assessments.

Drawing on implementations in STEM classrooms, including physics, chemistry, and engineering-oriented contexts, the lecture will illustrate how the AL+AI paradigm supports deeper conceptual understanding, strengthens transferable competencies, and aligns academic training with the collaborative, AI-augmented practices increasingly found in professional engineering and scientific environments.

The speaker

Francesc Xavier Giménez Font (Barcelona, 1963) is Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Barcelona, where he has developed a long academic career combining research, teaching innovation, science communication and knowledge transfer. He obtained his degree in Chemistry from the University of Barcelona in 1986 and completed his PhD in Physical Chemistry in 1991, with joint supervision between the University of Barcelona and the University of Perugia. Since 1993 he has served as professor in the Department of Physical Chemistry, after earlier appointments as assistant professor and visiting researcher.

His research activity focuses on computational and theoretical chemistry, particularly the atomistic simulation of chemical reactions and molecular processes. His work spans reaction dynamics, quantum and semiclassical mechanics, molecular dynamics and numerical simulation methods, with applied contributions in areas such as porous materials, gas adsorption and CO₂ capture. He has authored more than one hundred scientific papers in international journals, accumulating several thousand citations.

Alongside research, he has been strongly engaged in educational innovation in STEM disciplines. He developed the SABER Synchronous Flipped Classroom methodology, promoting active learning and student autonomy in university teaching and, more recently, incorporating Artificial Intelligence in everyday teaching practice. His contributions to science communication are equally significant: he has written over 150 popular science articles and several books addressing chemistry, environment and sustainability.

Throughout his career he has also been active in international academic collaboration, science outreach and educational leadership. In recognition of his work in scientific dissemination, he received the University of Barcelona Distinguished Award for Science and Humanities Dissemination in 2024 and the Catalan Chemical Society Award for Science Dissemination in 2025.