L'Imaginaerum: a research infrastructure for visual pedagogy with AI

L’Imaginaerum is a pedagogical research web platform that operates the didactic technique Imaginarium, published in 2025 by Springer Nature in the volume AI Roles and Responsibilities in Education (Lastra-Cid & Román-González, chapter 14). The technique, inspired by the board game Dixit, presents students with a curated corpus of AI-generated illustrations and asks them to choose the one that best represents a concept from their prior experience, along with written argumentation for that choice. Its theoretical foundation is based on Ausubel, Mayer, Paivio and Vygotsky.
The project has accumulated more than 20,000 accesses to its public gallery and brings together more than 140 certified Ibero-American teachers, with active presence in Chile, Mexico, Spain, Guatemala and Peru. The platform is offered free of charge to the academic community: the teacher receives the complete didactic instrument and the system keeps anonymized classroom data that feed the research.
The paper presents the architecture of the system and the first metrics of the corpus (480 experience-image relations recorded with a referential AI valuation that guides the teacher). From that basis it discusses the function that the project assigns to the AI: to produce the visual artifacts on which the student constructs meaning.