Military Academy Classrooms Explore New Paths, Making Artificial Intelligence a True "Teaching Partner"
An artificial intelligence class ended, but the students were reluctant to leave. Some were debugging algorithm visualization models, some were running simulations of unmanned system scenarios, and others had gathered together to showcase creative works generated by large models.
Having taught for many years, I have witnessed firsthand the evolution of this course. In the past, the "Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence" course was abstract in content and abstruse in its algorithms, with instruction focused primarily on knowledge memorization and theoretical understanding. Today, unmanned combat is iterating rapidly, and what the force urgently needs are new-type military personnel (新型军事人才) who understand intelligence, can think critically, excel at innovation, and are capable of collaboration. I often ask myself: in the wave of intelligentization (智能化浪潮), what kinds of capabilities should military academy classrooms cultivate? The answer lies in round after round of pedagogical reform and course refinement.
In recent years, my course team and I have explored a new path: using AI to learn AI, using AI to create AI, and making artificial intelligence a genuine "teaching partner" in the classroom.
We broke out of the traditional exam-oriented teaching mindset and focused on cultivating students' dialectical thinking ability, their capacity to analyze complex problems, and their human-machine collaboration ability. Leveraging intelligent teaching tools, students no longer passively receive knowledge but instead actively explore, practice independently, and verify findings through mutual assistance. In January of this year, drawing on the course's practical assignment system, we successfully held the school's first Generative AI Works Innovation Competition, from which a cohort of creative, valuable, and substantive works emerged.
Student Sun Yaohan's work, "A Physical Oceanography Knowledge Interactive Platform Based on Generative AI," won the grand prize. After the competition, he candidly noted that AI had demonstrated powerful content generation and code-processing capabilities during the project, "but the more than 2,000 lines of core code were interlocked link by link—pull one thread and the whole thing moves. To make good use of AI, the first thing is not to rely on it blindly."
"We must precisely filter interactive instructions, rigorously control the logic of creation, and use human thinking to lead AI and command AI." Sun Yaohan's reflection is exactly the outcome our pedagogical reform sought to achieve: teaching students to make good use of intelligent tools, elevate their thinking capabilities, and innovate grounded in actual combat.
With the cultivation of personnel as our foundation, we have driven the classroom through a three-step progressive upgrade toward digitalization, intelligentization, and personalization. In the fall semester of 2025, the college took the lead across the entire school in launching a pilot smart course (智慧课程) in artificial intelligence, building a comprehensive digital teaching resource matrix that includes 266 core knowledge points, 138 instructional videos, and 86 classic cases, supplemented by an algorithm visualization toolkit, a self-testing system of one thousand questions, and an around-the-clock AI tutoring agent—allowing learning to transcend the limits of time and space and precisely address each individual's weaknesses.
The "Fundamentals of Artificial Intelligence" course is a national-level first-class course and the first high-quality artificial intelligence course (精品课程) in the entire military. The course team has worked deeply in frontier areas, bringing real-combat cases such as swarm coordination (集群协同) and intelligent gaming (智能博弈) into the classroom, and integrating the concept of "people-centered, upward and toward the good (以人为本、向上向善)" throughout the entire process of personnel cultivation.
As the classroom has shifted from "acquiring knowledge" to "training thinking and strengthening capabilities," students' enthusiasm for innovation has continued to surge. In recent years, science and technology innovation projects and graduation thesis topics in the artificial intelligence track at our school have increased substantially, and multiple students have won prizes at competitions such as the China Robot and Artificial Intelligence Competition.
Our team has also traveled on multiple occasions to plateau border defense posts and front-line units to conduct special lectures and popularize knowledge of intelligent warfare (智能作战). Through platforms such as "Military Post Online" (军职在线), six online courses have been opened to the entire military, with course enrollments exceeding one hundred thousand. This year, we successfully passed the school's second-phase acceptance review for core artificial intelligence course teams and were rated excellent.
Working deeply at the front line of teaching, I have come to recognize more and more clearly: artificial intelligence education teaches cutting-edge technology and cultivates personnel capable of winning; it reforms the classroom model and strengthens the confidence to build a strong military (强军底气). As a military academy instructor, I will persist in the orientation of educating personnel for war (为战育人), teaching with intelligence, empowering with creativity, and leading with combat, and contribute to the building of our military's new-quality combat capabilities (新质战斗力).