Academic League of Artificial Intelligence: An Integrative Perspective of Teaching, Research, and Extension

Synthesis: Panisson et al. (2026) present the organizational framework of the Academic League of Artificial Intelligence (LIA) at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), a student-centered, project-based structure that integrates teaching, research, and university extension. The framework combines democratic governance, Collaborative Learning, and dynamic project organization to develop both technical and transversal competencies. Representative initiatives include competition teams, study groups, open lectures, knowledge repositories, and AI-powered applications with social impact. The paper argues this is a flexible, replicable model for embedding AI Education and AI Literacy into engineering and computing education through extracurricular, community-connected structures rather than formal coursework alone.

Key Findings

LIA at UFSC demonstrates an organizational framework that integrates teaching, research, and university extension through a student-centered, project-based approach to AI Education, offering a documented model that was previously absent from the computer science and engineering literature.
Democratic Governance—an annually elected student administrative board supervised by faculty mentors—ensures institutional continuity across generations, while a dynamic portfolio of projects keeps the league adaptable to emerging AI topics and student interests.
A single structure supports diverse outcomes: competition teams, peer-led study groups, open lecture series, knowledge repositories, and AI-powered applications with social impact each yield educational, scientific, and extension products.
The framework is a flexible, replicable reference model for embedding AI Literacy and community engagement into engineering and computing education, offering practical guidance for academic leagues and similar student organizations.

A Model for Extracurricular AI Education

Academic leagues are mechanisms for promoting extracurricular education and strengthening university-society integration. The Academic League of AI at UFSC demonstrates how a Collaborative Learning community can organize around AI education without being bound to a formal curriculum. Its framework rests on three pillars of the university mission—teaching, research, and extension—coordinated through democratic student governance. Rooted in Brazil's university system, the model exemplifies how AI Literacy can spread through interest-driven, extracurricular structures rather than formal coursework alone, and it functions as a Community Of Inquiry in which students, faculty mentors, and the broader community engage around artificial intelligence.

Democratic Governance and Organizational Structure

LIA pairs a stable administrative structure with a dynamic portfolio of projects. A student-elected administrative board—composed of a President, Vice-President, Secretary, and Communication Coordinator—is chosen annually through a democratic process, while faculty members act primarily as advisors and mentors. This Governance model allows students to assume the leading role in the league's strategic direction while preserving continuity across successive generations. Projects, in contrast, remain flexible: each is coordinated by a student leader elected by its members, and weekly meetings integrate the activities of all active projects. The separation between administrative management and project execution has proven essential to the league's Sustainability, fostering student leadership, protagonism, and collaborative decision-making.

Learning Through Project Organization

Projects such as competition teams and open lectures create Project Based Learning opportunities that develop leadership, scientific production, and community engagement. Study groups form the foundational Collaborative Learning mechanism, letting students investigate machine learning, computer vision, large language models (LLM), and multi-agent systems before engaging in research or development. Knowledge repositories institutionalize what members learn, while AI-powered applications with social impact connect Computational Thinking to real civic problems, embodying Active Learning, Self Directed Learning, and AI Literacy in practice.

Representative Projects

Representative initiatives illustrate how a single organizational structure produces educational, scientific, and extension outcomes. The LI(A)RA competition team developed intelligent agents for the Multi-Agent Programming Contest, integrated with an undergraduate course, and transformed its results into a booklet and a self-instructional online course. The "Open Talks about Artificial Intelligence" cycle promotes dialogue between the university and society, with recorded lectures made publicly available. The Repository of Knowledge in Artificial Intelligence (RepoAI) consolidates tutorials and implementation examples as an Open Source knowledge base supporting member onboarding and knowledge preservation. Study groups underpin every initiative, and the GAIA project develops AI-powered interactive applications with social impact—including Forca Libras—addressing education and Accessibility challenges through serious games and rehabilitation technologies, promoting digital inclusion and democratizing access to AI knowledge.

Replicability for AIED

The reported experience offers practical guidance for other academic leagues and student organizations seeking to integrate the three university pillars. It complements formal AIED instruction by providing informal, interest-driven pathways into AI Education, and it illustrates how transversal competencies such as Critical Thinking, leadership, and Lifelong Learning can be fostered through Student Experience-centered Governance rather than top-down curricula. The framework demonstrates an approach to Curriculum Design and engineering and computing education that scales across computer science programs and extends beyond Brazil's university context.

Implications

For educators and administrators, LIA's experience offers a concrete, replicable model for embedding AI education and outreach in universities through extracurricular, community-connected structures rather than formal coursework alone. It highlights how Student Engagement and student protagonism can be institutionalized through democratic governance and peer-led study groups, and how open repositories sustain institutional memory across successive generations of students. For researchers, the case underscores the need for documented organizational models in computer science and engineering—an area the literature has largely neglected—and for empirical studies examining how such leagues develop technical and transversal competencies over time.

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Citation

Panisson, A. R., Vianna, M. E. W. M., da Silva, I. F., da Silva, H. H., Savaris, R. F., Costa, B. P., et al. (2026). Academic League of Artificial Intelligence: An Integrative Perspective of Teaching, Research, and Extension.

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