AI4OPT provides mentorship and programs to students from underrepresented groups so that they can gain valuable and real-world experience in the field of AI and optimization. AI4OPT is actively involved in outreach activities to promote awareness and interest in these fields among high school students, such as our Seth Bonder Camp which encourages more young people to pursue careers and higher education in STEM to ensure that the next generation of AI and operations research professionals is more diverse and inclusive at a massive scale.
High school education a critical component of the proposed pathways
Our goal is to expose students as early as possible to the opportunities offered by AI and give them confidence to enter the field and acquire the skills necessary to be successful. To achieve this goal,
The high school education programs are organized around three pillars:
- The Institute has entered partnerships with high schools in Georgia and California to offer dedicated, longitudinal training camps in data and computational sciences, and AI.
- The Institute is collaborating with Drew Charter High School to teach yearly engineering practice courses on machine learning.
- The Institute is developing teacher versions of the camps to help high-school STEM teachers prepare the students and offer the material themselves in their schools, either as regular or as flipped classes.
The Institute will deliver Massively Open Online (MOOC) versions of the camps, that can then be deployed in various institutions as flipped classes.
The Seth Bonder Camp
Overview
Seth Bonder Camp 2022
The Institute builds on existing partnerships (through the Seth Bonder camp in computational and data science) with historically black high schools in Georgia. It also builds on its collaboration with KidsTeachTech (KTT) to bring the Seth Bonder camp to hispanic-serving high schools in California. In 2021, the Institute team has delivered five online camps for about 150 students. Two were in collaboration with historically black high schools and the the California camp included 82% of underrepresented students (Black, LatinX, Indigenous, Low-Income and/or Women). KTT piloted the Seth Bonder data science camp for the first time and it became one of their most popular summer camps. In a couple of weeks, it attracted more than 60 students mostly from under-served populations. In thispartnership, KTT takes the role of complementing in-person data science camp by their online nature of teaching.
2022 Seth Bonder Camps in Computational and Data Sciences.
- June 21-24: dedicated to Drew Charter High School and Banneker High School (offered in person at Georgia Tech). Banneker High School services approximately 1,449 students. Students at the school are 94.1% Black (non-Hispanic), 4.1% Hispanic, and 0.9% multiracial. 100% are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. Drew Charter High School services approximately 997 students. Students at the school are 60.6% Black (non-Hispanic), 28.9% white, and 5.2% multiracial. 78.6% are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.
- July 11-15: open to the general public (offered in person at Georgia Tech).
- July 11-15: Kids Teach Tech camp (virtual)
2022 Teacher Fellows
- June 6-24: teacher fellow program for high-school teachers.
The teacher fellowship program is built to expose teachers to the exciting field of artificial intelligence and data science while giving them an academic research experience. The teacher fellows will take the role of being the leaders in their schools whose mission is to increase the awareness of data science to the student population in their school. The fellowship program is a three-week-long program that encompasses one week during the Spring semester for the student recruitment to data science summer camps and establishing the data collection plan, another week during the Summer semester for data science computing training and leading their students through the summer camps. Lastly, the final week will take place during Fall semester. During their final week, teacher fellows are expected to facilitate an activity or organize data science related day in their home schools.
2022 Engineering Practice
During Spring 2022, Pascal Van Hentenryck and Ms White (Drew Charter High School) delivered an Engineering Practice class on deep learning at Drew. The students implemented deep-learning models for sentiment analysis, price forecasting, and computer vision, culminating in deep-learning models for recognizing objects and people from datasets they created.
Articles
Gratitude
Over the years, the high school initiative has received partial funding from the Seth Bonder Foundation, whose generous contributions we deeply appreciate. Merrill Bonder's vision and leadership, in particular, have been indispensable to the success of this initiative. Furthermore, we extend our gratitude to INFORMS and Pinar Keskinocak for establishing the INFORMS DEI Ambassadors Program, which facilitated the meeting between Charles Pierre and Pascal Van Hentenryck which sparked the education initiative. Last but not least, we would like to express our special thanks to the NSF, whose support of AI4OPT (NSF Grant Award #2112533) is enabling us to realize our goal of promoting equitable access to AI.
KTT - Kids Teach Tech
Empowering Youth to Teach Programming and Technology for Their Communities
AI4OPT’s collaboration with Kids Teach Tech (KTT) brings the Seth Bonder camp to Hispanic-serving high schools in California. In 2021, the Institute team has delivered five online camps for about 150 students. Two were in collaboration with historically black high schools and the California camp included 82% of underrepresented students (Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Low-Income and/or Women). KTT piloted the Seth Bonder data science camp for the first time, and it became one of their most popular summer camps. In a couple of weeks, it attracted more than 60 students mostly from under-served populations. In this partnership, KTT takes the role of complementing in-person data science camp by their online nature of teaching.
About
Kids Teach Tech empowers youth to seize the technology opportunities of their future. We enable students to become teachers who create and teach classes for their community. We teach free classes to youth in libraries, schools, non-profit groups, and live-online across California, the United States, and now Internationally.
Drew Charter High School
AI4OPT has been collaborating with Drew Charter High School in Atlanta, Georgia, since Fall 2021, to offer engineering practice courses focused on machine learning. The courses are designed to provide students with hands-on experience in developing facial recognition systems, using coding applications, such as Python, and exploring AI and ML.
Overview
To create this comprehensive and ongoing program, the SBC is structured into three different "Levels." The newest camp at “Level 3” concentrated on Deep Learning. It implemented and evaluated by a semester-long course at Drew Charter High School, in 2022.
High School Education Team
