Conference Program

Generative artificial intelligences (GAI), through their rapid development, are profoundly reshaping the educational landscape. Current literature highlights how the use of A.I in education can positively affect several dimensions, including instructional personalization, learning outcomes, collaborative and communicative dynamics, reduction of cognitive load, and overall enhancement of cognitive skills. At the same time significant risks have been identified, such as overreliance and cognitive deskilling. As reported by Tian & Zheng (2025), the effects of A.I on the development of skills such as the 4Cs are also influenced by the role it assumes within the educational process (e.g., tutor, peer, or collaborator).

This makes it strategically important to define conditions and interaction models capable of guiding the use of A.I, framing it as a tool for cognitive augmentation rather than as a purely performative and opaque technology.

Seymour Papert’s constructionist pedagogy offers a potential interpretative key, both due to the centrality of creative activity in the process of knowledge construction and through what he define as “objects to think with”: tools enabling students to engage in cognitively meaningful activities. Levin et al. extend this concept to A.I, shifting from objects to “agents to think with.” These can function as maieutic tutors and cognitive exoskeletons capable of stimulating reasoning while keeping learners pivotal in their cognitive processes, thus preserving agency and cognitive abilities.

This perspective suggests a reversal of the interaction axis between user and A.I where, rather than having a learner passivly searching for an output, we figure an agent guiding him maieutically fostering cognitive processes, divergent thinking, creative and critical skills.

Along these lines, this paper aims to present the Tool Engagement × Human Engagement (TExHE) interaction paradigm. Designed to stimulate user agency as defined by Bandura (2001)—intentionality, forethought, self-reactiveness, and self-reflectiveness—within constructionist learning contexts, TExHE supports the configuration of co-constructionist “agents to think with,” outlining their characteristics and pedagogical aims. The agent’s behaviors (Tool Engagement) should be modeled both according to Levin’s definition of “agents to think with” and according to Resnick’s (2018) principles of effective educational tools: low floors (accessibility), high ceilings (high potential), and wide walls (flexibility). These features are intended to foster Human Engagement, understood as the degree of cognitive and self-regulatory involvement through which the learner guides, structures, and evaluates their own mental processes.

The relationship between Tool Engagement and Human Engagement is therefore asymmetrical and dynamic: the agent’s intervention remains subordinated to, and functionally oriented toward, the preservation and enhancement of the learner’s agency.

A first application of this paradigm, currently under field experimentation, is the Gemini Gem Clair. As a constructionist tutor, Clair supports users in creative processes by integrating the TExHE paradigm, which determines its behavioral logic, with the Creative Problem Solving Framework 6.1, which structures its operational workflow, acting both as a facilitator and as an enhancer of creative performance. Moreover, its implementation through Gemini Gems ensures replicability and accessibility of similar tools within school contexts, offering design possibilities potentially within teachers’ reach.