NOVI, Mich. — Instructor Raghu Arghal presented the trolley dilemma — a thought experiment in which a bystander must choose between saving five people or one person — to a room of teens in an artificial intelligence summer course.
A computer science and AI researcher, Arghal asked the Michigan high school students to consider the variations of solving the fictional ethical question and applying the same thought process to real-world scenarios, including autonomous vehicles, where computer instructions are making decisions that affect lives.
“Now we are in positions where we have algorithms that are making decisions with consequences on a similar scale. So if it’s ambiguous morally for humans and they can’t come to an agreement, there are huge implications when we let computers make these decisions for themselves,” Arghal said.
At Novi High School this summer, Arghal and fellow teacher Adithya Sairamachandran are leading AI Scholars, an in-person boot camp that exposes high school students to fundamental AI concepts and guides them to build a project with social impact.
The two-week, pre-college enrichment program costs $1,500 and was created by Inspirit AI, a company started to inspire students at an early age to understand and apply Artificial Intelligence to improve the world, said Maddie Bradshaw, director of product at the Palo Alto, California company.
“It’s this idea that high schoolers can learn how to see themselves in AI and apply it to their interests,” Bradshaw said. “AI is a hot topic. We want to provide students with a toolkit so they can see its impact on medicine, criminal justice and economics. So students can see themselves in the fields they may be entering.”
The intensive summer school comes at a time when many Michigan school districts lack policies on AI’s use in the classroom or for schoolwork, even though it is moving quickly into the lives of young people and as a national debate has emerged over how to best manage the tool in personal lives and workplaces.
At the Novi summer school, organizers said they are bringing the most recent developments in AI from courses and labs in Silicon Valley to empower high school students globally. The focus on ethics is just as important, Bradshaw said.
“Just like other types of technology, AI is a tool that exists,” she said. “We want students to learn social, cultural, economic implications of this technology with the intentions of them using this tool for good.”
How AI course works
About 17 students are spending two weeks learning about AI’s core technologies, including applications, foundational concepts and programming tools. In the second half of the course, students complete a mentor-led AI for Social Good project where they apply the programming skills they’ve learned.
Among the projects the students are working on:
- A music recommender system that uses review logistic regression, a technique that estimates the probability of an event occurring, predicts which songs will become top hits based on different song metrics and then designs a system to recommend new songs to listeners.
- A distracted driver program that uses computer vision to improve road safety. Program officials said students use machine-learning techniques, including “convolutional neural networks and transfer learning to create and improve effective models.” The network uses three-dimensional data for image classification and object recognition tasks, according to IBM. The model then is put through challenge exercises, and students will analyze when the program succeeds and fails, course organizers said.
Teens and their families are already using AI in everyday life, from Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant technology, to iPhone’s face recognition technology. Averi Moncrief, 16, enrolled in the intensive program to further her interest in engineering as a career. She came to the class with some coding experience but not in Python, which she learned in the first week of summer class.
“AI can be used for a wonderful thing like medical advancement or to make life a whole lot easier. It can be a great thing if used correctly. If not used correctly, it can become a problem,” Moncrief said.
Part of classroom discussions have included how AI and human “thinking” differ, Moncrief said, explaining that AI sees letters of words while humans see the full sentence.
“AI kind of thinks like humans but not quite like humans,” she said.
Vrishab Makam, 15, said he signed up to learn more about foundational AI concepts and Python notebooks. The 10th grader is part of the robotics team at Novi High School and wants to focus on computer science.
“It’s very beginner-friendly, and I liked that,” Makam said. “We are learning about different applications of AI like computer vision, natural language processing. Like AI being able to read and understand text and understand what they actually mean. Not just looking at the characters, but retain the meaning.”
Schools face AI challenges
Michigan educators said school districts still face the challenge of training teachers to use all the new tools available for lesson planning, direct instruction and one-on-one tutoring for students. Teachers are changing their assignments to be more AI proof, and schools are looking to integrate AI into courses to teach students appropriate use.
In April, Michigan Virtual released a K-12 AI Guidance document that offers an educator approach to AI use, including recommended practices and data stewardship. It focuses on the impacts of data compliance, ethical use requirements and the challenges around disclosure for educators.
Michigan Virtual, a nonprofit that provides online courses for students and professional development for educators, created an AI Lab to support schools as they learn about the technology.
Justin Bruno, an AI learning strategist at Michigan Virtual, said most Michigan school districts are in the early stages of navigating AI, holding awareness sessions to make sure teachers, administrators, parents and students understand what AI is and its potential impact on education before they dive into developing and creating policies.
“Schools want to build AI literacy among their staff first. They are hesitant to take any steps before they know their teachers are ready,” Bruno said. “It’s been a grassroots approach and mostly dependent on the teacher and their own capacity.”
The next steps for school districts include forming an advisory team and exploring AI tools, Bruno said, as well as exploring equity issues around AI, such as that the technology might create disadvantages for minority or low-income students.
“School leaders are trying to figure this out among all the competing priorities,” Bruno said.
Although some schools are trying to restrict student use of things like ChatGPT, Sairamachandran said he encourages educators and the public not to view AI as the enemy but as an aid to learning.
“At the end of the day, as educators, our goal is to ensure that students know how to work with the technology around them,” he said. “They are going to be entering a workforce in a couple of years from now where this is going to be commonplace. We are using AI in the real world.”
