Last year, my friends and I founded the AI club at our school. Recently exploding in popularity, AI has become one of the most powerful and controversial new technologies. Despite the trend, our school had no resources for students to get involved in the world of AI. I felt there was no outlet for students interested in higher-level programming, and wanted to build such a community through a school club.
Our goal for the AI club was to show that anyone, no matter their experience, could harness the power of AI through code. Our mission was also to break down and discuss the ethics of current AI-related events.
The first year was far from easy. We dealt with many unexpected hurdles, such as our school's (very) thorough website restrictions and finding enough content for each meeting.
The biggest challenge, however, was progressing from basic Python to programming entire machine learning projects, since many of our members were new to coding. With only one lunchtime meeting per week, we had to find a balance between of moving quickly enough to cover all the necessary topics and not speeding through and losing interest.
To keep our club members engaged, we interlaced walking through Kaggle coding tutorials and exploring niche AI news.
Through countless Kahoots, games, and coding sessions, we mastered basic Python coding and common Scikit-Learn models such as Random Forest and Decision Tree Regressor.
I'm proud of both the work the officers and I put in to organize the AI club and the effort of our members to learn difficult AI concepts. Sifting through the web for intriguing AI content often took hours, but I learned so much in the process.
Besides teaching members to code their own AI projects, one of the key components of our success was that we brought members down the "iceberg" of AI, sharing obscure but fascinating stories about the latest developments.
As the first year drew to a close, the AI club grew to become our school's first dedicated community of AI enthusiasts.
The reprise:
The start of the new school year marked the start of AI club. This past Tuesday, September 26th, we had our first meeting! I was filled with anticipation, but confident in our experience from last year. We had several new members and played a game of AI-themed Jeopardy (with candy prizes!) to introduce the new and returning members into the club atmosphere.
The meeting was a success!
In addition to continuing our club's mission, we have several new ideas and activities planned for the year. We will be using OpenAI's GPT-3 API in our coding projects to explore in depth its capabilities beyond ChatGPT (did you know it can create images?).
Because AI seemingly evolves at light speed, we want to discuss more deeply about today’s controversies, such as the spread of AI in the entertainment industry. Like last year, we will start teaching from a place of no programming experience, but will keep both new and returning members engaged by introducing new, larger-scale AI projects.
Stay tuned for more AI club updates!
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brilliant. thanks for your contributions. i can't wait for more AI club updates