On Wednesday 23rd November, Simon from Tablet Academy came to KWS to deliver a workshop “AI for Youth”. This was aimed at Year 8 students and a morning session and an afternoon session were delivered. The aim of the workshop was to introduce students to AI and get them to think about technology and its uses. They looked at deepfakes, shopping, images using AI and they programmed some chatbots in Scratch. Here is what a few students had to say about the session.

“The AI workshop was a great way to hop into the world of artificial intelligence and how everything works behind a screen. It was very useful and we learned a lot in terms of algorithms and patterns. We did many projects such as teaching the computer examples of kind things and mean things so it could detect whether something is a compliment or an insult. We also played rock paper scissors against an AI to find the pattern the AI had chosen based on our human choices.” Sofia D

“It was really fun! I enjoyed coding the mean/kind things. It was useful because I learned how to use the coding site and I would enjoy doing it again. It was also cool to learn how AI works.” Robert S

“It was very fun, and I learned a lot about how in the future companies have predicted that there will be more AI. It was also interesting learning about how self-driving cars recognise images.” Daisy V

“The AI workshop was amazing. It was full of many intriguing activities including many games, which helped us learn about the development of AI. I am glad I attended it and would definitely do it again. I also recommend it to any other year groups, if they were to get the chance. Thank you for giving us the opportunity. ” Darci M

“I really enjoyed the workshop, it gave me so much more inspiration to become a technician or coder. I recommend this to anyone who loves tech and strives to be a technician when they grow up.” Saskia W

“We learnt about how to distinguish AI from reality, how AI can guess what you are thinking (akinator), how we are training AI (I’m not a robot, the Quick Draw game). We learnt how AI takes features from, for example, cats and dogs, and distinguishes two apart, and takes trends and guesses what you are thinking etc. We also learnt about the future of what AI can do and how it can be dangerous.” Kako F

Miss Fatima