Xiao Jing’en (right), a sixth-grade student from Yuzhi Primary School, and Yang Yicheng, a third-grade student from Jurong Secondary School, are two award-winning students in the first National Primary and Secondary School Chinese Reading Fun Competition. A total of 50 students won awards. (Photographed by Kuang Qicong)
Can reading competitions also use artificial intelligence? The first National Primary and Secondary School Chinese Reading Fun Competition has introduced artificial intelligence technology, with artificial intelligence assisting in the entire process from registration, question setting to evaluation. This not only adds a sense of freshness and challenge to the competition but also makes the event fairer and more efficient.
The finals of the Chinese Reading Fun Competition will be held at Nanyang Girls’ High School on Saturday (August 23rd). The preliminary round in July attracted a total of 2,541 students from 239 primary and secondary schools, and eventually 135 students from the primary and secondary school groups advanced to the finals.
This competition is co-hosted by the Committee for Promoting Chinese Language Learning and the Singapore Association for Artificial Intelligence in Education (formerly known as the Singapore Association for Artificial Intelligence in Language Education). Its aim is to cultivate students’ interest in reading, promote a culture of Chinese reading, and help them develop good reading habits.
Dr. Chua Chee Lee, President of the Association for Artificial Intelligence in Education, said in an interview that this competition adopted a free registration method, and it was originally expected that 3,000 to 5,000 students would participate. “It would have been impossible to handle it without the assistance of an artificial intelligence (AI) system. Usually, competitions only have two to three hundred students, and it becomes difficult to manage with more than that.”
The organizer therefore developed an artificial intelligence system to automatically handle the competition process, including registration, generating accounts and passwords, and notifying details of the preliminary round.
The competition is divided into five groups from primary school to middle school, with a total of 33 designated reading materials covering different age groups: from picture books for lower-grade primary school students, to adapted versions of *Journey to the West* for students from Grade 3 to Grade 6, and *Water Margin* suitable for upper-grade middle school students. Students have two and a half months to complete their reading preparations before the competition.
The preliminary round is conducted online. Students log into the system with their accounts to answer questions. The primary school group must answer 20 multiple-choice questions, while the middle school group answers 30. Scores are evaluated by artificial intelligence. After advancing to the final round, the number of questions for each group increases by 10, and the scores are jointly evaluated by artificial intelligence and teachers. Finally, 10 winners are selected from each group.
Chua Chee Lee revealed that the organizing team input all the reading materials into a large language model, which generated over 3,000 questions. These questions were then screened one by one, with inappropriate ones eliminated to ensure the quality of the question bank. To prevent cheating, during the preliminary round, each group’s question bank contains approximately 300 questions. Each student receives different questions and options, and the time taken to answer the questions is also taken into account in the scoring.
Liu Jiemin: Let reading become an indispensable part of life
Fifty winners received their awards from Low Yen Ling, Senior Minister of State for Education and Ministry of Communications and Information, and Chairman of the Promote Mandarin Council, on Saturday. In her speech at the event, Low Yen Ling said that she hoped students could experience the joy and charm of reading through participating in this activity, while developing a good habit of reading Chinese books. “May reading not just be a competition, but become an indispensable part of your lives.”
One of the winners, Xiao Jing’en (12), a sixth-grade student at Yuzhi Primary School, said that during the competition, she spent time reading almost every day, and sometimes even used the school’s morning reading sessions to do so.
“The six designated reading materials were not difficult for me because I have the habit of reading regularly. This time, it gave me a deeper understanding of *Journey to the West* and more motivation to continue reading it.”
Yang Yicheng (15), a third-year student at Jurong Secondary School, is another winner. He learned about the competition through his classmates and signed up for it. Although his classmates were eliminated in the preliminary round because they did not finish reading all the materials, he persisted in finishing all the reading materials.
He said that *Water Margin* is the most challenging. “The character relationships are complex, the story rhythm is highly fluctuating, and the protagonist changes in each chapter. If one’s Chinese proficiency is not high enough, it will be quite strenuous.” His strategy is to first read the synopsis and then delve into the details.
(Reprinted from Lianhe Zaobao, Singapore)