Introducing: The AI Education Project
The AI Forum is now The AI Education Project (aiedu.org).
After discussions with hundreds of teachers and many hundreds more technologists, business leaders, academics, parents, and students, we realized that our name should clearly reflect the work we are doing.
Our name may be different, but our work remains the same: make foundational learning about artificial intelligence accessible to students across America.
“We are solving for the curiosity gap among students who stand to be the most adversely impacted by the technology”
The AI Forum began as a research project funded by seed money from Booz Allen Hamilton, Postmates, and H5 to better understand how people outside the technology sector are learning about artificial intelligence. (A big hat tip for the whip-smart Ian Moura who led this work.)
We focused primarily in the U.S., but also referenced international examples (such as Finland’s Elements of AI online course), to look for approaches that successfully reached people who aren’t naturally inclined to read and learn about AI on their own, that is, most people.
We wanted to understand how average Americans are learning about what Silicon Valley is heralding as ‘the new electricity.’
Our research naturally started with high schools. Surely students are being taught about the Future of Work, we thought, and figured any curricula designed for high school audiences would be a good place to start.
We actually didn’t find much.
There is a big, vibrant ecosystem of computer science programs, curricula, and summer camps. There are too many to list here, but we’re talking about stellar organizations like AI4All, Code.org, CS First, and Exploring Computer Science. These orgs are doing incredible work, but the project of increasing access to computer science education is very different from making sure that every student has a basic, fundamental knowledge about how AI will affect their work and their lives. Perhaps more critically, the vast majority of students in underserved communities—especially students of color—still do not have access to computer science classes.
What’s missing is broadly adopted civics-minded curricula that teaches students how to be savvy workers, customers, and citizens in the age of artificial intelligence. Curricula that explores topics which don’t require teaching a single line of code. Curricula that uses the lens of ethics, politics, and socio-economics to empower the humanities alongside STEM. Curricula that English, History, Math, and Science teachers are already equipped to facilitate, without any rigorous coding bootcamps or training programs. Such curricula would be significantly easier for underserved schools to integrate.
We decided to build just that. And the AI Education Project was born.
We expanded our founding team to include Ora D. Tanner, a 12-year educator and instructional designer, lined up a Title 1 high school in Akron, Ohio that committed to piloting whatever we built, and got to work.
I’ll save the story about our pilot and product development for another post, so let’s fast-forward to September 2020: We were accepted into FastForward’s prestigious tech nonprofit Accelerator, advanced to the semifinals in the Penn-Milken Education Business Plan Competition, and assembled a stellar network of advisors, board members, and partners from organizations like Google, Nike, Disney, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford Law School, the Penn Graduate School of Education, and the U.S. Airforce (to name-drop just a few).
We have two successful pilots under our belt in Ohio and Florida, and 20+ schools are rolling out our Beta curriculum to more than 2,000 students this Fall. We have more than 50 schools on the waiting list for the Spring, and are currently fundraising to scale our program to teach 100,000 students by 2022.
We have a tremendous amount of work ahead of us. There are no laurels to rest on. But the progress we made over the past year is a testament to the power of a simple idea: let’s make sure the next generation is prepared to navigate the new digital world they are about to graduate into. It will look a lot different from anything their parents or teachers could imagine. There will be risks and danger, but more importantly there will be green fields for those students who harness the incredible opportunities ahead of them.
More to come!
