UCF researchers have developed an innovative offering to better prepare students for a future enabled by artificial intelligence (AI).
The inaugural AI, Robotics and Entrepreneurship Summer Institute, held this past summer, gave high school students the opportunity to develop and propose autonomous solutions to real-world problems.
“AI is moving into workplaces faster than schools can respond to it,” says Vishnu Prabhu, an assistant professor at the School of Modeling, Simulation and Training (SMST). “Most high school students already use these tools every day, but very few are taught how the technology actually works, where it fails or how to build something with it.”
The NSF-funded outreach effort was a joint venture created by SMST and the Rosen College of Hospitality Management, with additional funding provided by VentureWell. The project’s research team served as the event organizers: principal investigator (PI) Associate Professor Arthur Huang from Rosen College, with co-PIs Prabhu from SMST and Associate Professor Mehmet Altin from Rosen College.
The group offered two sessions, geared toward an age group poised to make critical decisions about their future: high school students.
“High school is when students decide what they are and are not capable of,” Prabhu says. “A week does not make anyone an engineer, but it can change what a student believes is available to them.”
The inaugural camps welcomed a total of 60 students, including 35 from more than 20 different high schools across the state and one international student for the first session, and 20 students from NeoCity Academy in Kissimmee for the second session.
Each weeklong event covered a number of areas. Following an introduction to AI and programming concepts at the start of the week, students had the opportunity to program autonomous drones, robots and AI cameras to solve real-world problems. On the last day, students presented their prototypes and pitched their business proposals.
“Every lab was framed around a real operational problem rather than a toy exercise,” Prabhu says. “Teams programmed drones to fly inspection routes across multiple sites, robots to handle hospital transport and agricultural inspection, and vision systems to detect and classify objects. Then they built the business case around it, which meant costing out the hardware, sizing the market and defending the idea in front of the room. The technical work and the entrepreneurial thinking arrived together.”
Throughout the sessions, organizers kept the overarching issue of AI and ethics front and center, encouraging its discussion during lessons and activities.
“Bias, privacy and the changing shape of work are not side topics for this generation,” Prabhu says. “They are the conditions they will work under.”
Prabhu served as the lead for the robotics and programming sessions, Huang led discussions on AI ethics in the workplace, and Mehmet spearheaded the entrepreneurship and business aspects of lessons. Graduate students Dariush Sajjadi, Paul Amoruso, Venkat Addala and Jack Austin served as guides and counselors for the teams as they worked on their projects.
Organizers received overwhelmingly positive feedback from the camps, along with suggestions from the students that they plan to incorporate in next year’s offerings: a longer camp to give attendees more time to devote to projects and tougher challenges for students who already have a coding background.
“What they seemed to value most was subtler than any single activity,” Prabhu says. “It was the moment code they wrote themselves made a physical object move. That gap between typing on a laptop and watching a robot respond is where the subject stops being abstract. One student wrote that it was her first time writing code and that she was proud of what her team pulled off, which is about as good an outcome as I could ask for.”
Looking back on the success of the camps, Prabhu credits the strong collaboration between SMST, Rosen College and the UCF STEM Office, as well as the volunteers who attended the camp each day.
“Our graduate students carried a large share of the week and deserve real credit for it. So do the teachers and counselors,” he says.
He adds that he hopes the students came away with the understanding that questioning AI’s limits and capabilities is an instinct that should be encouraged, and that pursuing a career in AI is a viable career path that is open to anyone.
“Many [students] had never worked in a university lab with real equipment before,” he says. “Sixteen of the students in the first session told us that learning more about UCF was part of why they came, and I hope they left able to picture themselves here.”
- Written by Bel Huston