What kids built with AI this summer: drones, art and a $120 sensor

Somewhere in Durham, North Carolina, four school students decided that the most useful thing they could build with artificial intelligence was a drone that finds hurricane survivors. Not a homework shortcut. Not an imaginary friend. A search-and-rescue system, entered under the cheerfully dramatic team name HADES, with a project description promising drones that locate survivors in real time, “cutting search times and saving lives”.

That idea earned them a place at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, presenting alongside four other winning teams at America’s Youth AI Festival, a national gathering of about 250 students and teachers held from 17 to 19 July, timed to coincide with America’s 250th anniversary. If your news feed only ever serves kids-and-AI stories about cheating and creepy chatbots, this event is worth a few minutes of your attention. It is what the other side of the ledger looks like.

A festival where the kids do the showing

The festival was the finale of Responsible AI for America’s Youth, a campaign run by Day of AI, the schools programme built at MIT’s RAISE initiative (the name stands for Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education). From February, students across the United States entered national competitions in visual arts, performing arts, civics and community problem-solving.

The art contest, called Me, Myself, and AI, set a lovely brief: make two original artworks, one showing your community today and one imagining it 50 years from now. The winning entries, all by students in Grades 9 to 11, went on display at the MIT Museum during the festival. One, by a Grade 11 student in Newark, New Jersey, is titled A Free Venezuela. Another, from Auburn, Alabama, is called Which Way We Run. The brief is about AI, but the thinking is entirely theirs: teenagers reckoning with time, place and belonging.

“Artificial intelligence will shape how young people live, learn, create, and connect,” said Cynthia Breazeal, the MIT professor who directs RAISE, when the winners were announced. The festival’s bet is that the shaping should run both ways.

Five things kids chose to build

The AI for a Better World competition, presented by Britebound and developed with MIT Solve, asked student teams for AI ideas that would help their communities. Five winning teams presented at the MIT Media Lab, and the list reads like a research lab’s wish list:

• BoostT1D (Newton, Massachusetts): decision support to help people with Type 1 diabetes make sense of glucose data, with a focus on newly diagnosed families.
• HADES (Durham, North Carolina): the autonomous hurricane-rescue drones.
• NeuroCore (Atlanta, Georgia): a wearable designed to turn rehabilitation into an active process rather than passive support.
• Project Rhine (Princeton, New Jersey and Mooresville, North Carolina): a US$120 water-quality sensor node that detects contamination and can work offline.
• ResonAIte (Ivyland, Pennsylvania): speech recognition tuned to individual deaf speakers, for the everyday moments where being understood matters most.

Notice what is missing. Nothing on that list is about doing less work. Every project takes a real problem (a diagnosis in the family, a storm season, contaminated water) and reaches for AI as a way to act on it.

The part adults usually keep for themselves

The festival’s most quietly radical move had nothing to do with technology. One hundred high-school students, two from every US state, were brought to the Edward M. Kennedy Institute in Boston as “Student Senators” with a job: draft a national AI policy for public school classrooms. AASA, the association of American school superintendents, says the student-authored policy will be distributed to its network of more than 10,000 school leaders after the event.

Sit with that for a second. In most of the world, classroom AI rules are written by adults, about kids, usually after something has gone wrong. Here, the students got the pen first, with 50 school leaders attending workshops of their own down the hall.

The read from Singapore

This was a very American weekend, full of state delegations and 250th-birthday bunting. But almost none of it depends on being American.

Day of AI’s curriculum is free, built at MIT, and has reached more than two million students worldwide, with programme hubs stretching from Australia and New Zealand to Central and East Asia. Any parent or teacher here can use the same materials.

More useful than the materials, though, is the stance. Every piece of the festival treats children as makers and authors, not as users to be managed. That stance costs nothing to copy at home. Swap one hour of your child consuming AI for one hour of making something with it: a story, a poster for their room, a plan for a science experiment, a quiz for the family. (And teach them to check the machine’s claims while they are at it; we wrote a guide to fact-checking AI with your child.)

Then try the festival’s question at dinner: if you could build one thing with AI to fix a problem you can see from our front door, what would it be? Kids in Durham said hurricane drones. Yours will say something you have not thought of yet. That answer, taken seriously, is worth more than any parental-control setting.