Why I am heavily invested in integrating AI into mainstream school education

So… Much like the rest of the country in the great 90's and early 2000's, I too went to an engineering college. From rote learning to outdated curriculum that accomplished very little in the real world, it seemed apparent that engineering curriculum was not quite cut out for me. After a couple of unsuccessful attempts to drop out, I decided to complete the curriculum dreaming of the day when I will be free. I wanted to “build things”, innovate, lead and most ironically, engineering college was not the place to do any of these.

Fast forward today, I am putting together an interesting team of teachers to teach AI to over 5,000 students in the IBM-CBSE partnership announced recently. The teaching team includes an engineering back bencher (myself), a drama teacher, humanities teacher, a hindi teacher, teach for India fellows and a couple of erstwhile techies. At first glance these profiles don't match up your typical AI teacher profile, but after personally teaching #1M1B's Future Leaders curriculum for over 150+ hours during the last 3 years and spending good amount of time with various teachers, we realized that we needed a fresh approach to teaching pervasive technologies like AI. The end goal is to make AI go mainstream, involve subject teachers (not just computer science teachers), make AI fun, cool, teach ethics in AI and show real life application. Today, I want to share with you why we are doing this and what this journey has been like for me

The first question - what can AI do for me?

Over several brainstorming sessions with teachers and principals, what I realized was that our views on the lack of inclusiveness during the digital literacy era were 100% aligned. The most important takeaway from these sessions was that instead of the previous era of digital literacy that only focused on computer science teachers and STEM students, the impact of AI is far more pervasive. And holds the potential to have far more far-reaching consequences across all aspects of life. So the teaching community and technology companies both need to start viewing AI education as an opportunity to:

• Correct the mistakes of the past in terms of the inclusiveness and impact of technology
• Be future-ready with skills that can truly make a difference through meaningful innovation

Both these objectives can be accomplished by starting AI education at the high school level instead of just focusing on engineering colleges or STEM streams. But more importantly, educators as well as students – the future leaders of technologies like AI – must start asking the right question. And the right question is “What Can AI Do For Me?”

But they can only ask these questions when they understand the impact of AI on real life. Instead of viewing it as ‘building robots’ or programming in Python, they need to start looking at it as a tool to solve real challenges. The fact remains that AI can change the world for the better– from rural entrepreneurship to new healthcare solutions and designing hospitals of the future, improving farming and our food supply, helping refugees acclimatize to new environments, improving educational resources and access, and even cleaning our oceans, air, and water supply. The potential for humans to improve the world through AI is endless, as long as we know how to use it.

When communities and individuals, educators and students ask “what can AI do for me?”, they build a healthy and productive relationship with the technology. But more importantly, they will have a say in in how AI impacts their lives.

How we are going about it

1.     Focus on the educator – Bringing school teachers across subjects and disciplines into the fold of AI education at the school level is the only sustainable way to leverage AI beyond the exclusive technology circles. This should not stop at classroom format training's alone. By giving teachers simple AI tools to experiment with, we also give them an opportunity to practice and apply AI in their classes. More importantly, teachers like to contribute. So we must provide them with exchange forums where they can learn and implement as well as contribute to curriculum and teaching method ideas.

2.     Focus on the students – We need to engage students in AI by –

• Simplifying the subject matter to make it fun and cool
• Training young minds to notice the challenges around them, and enable them to use AI to solve for these challenges
• And finally and most importantly, making ethical AI a strong component of the curriculum for it to enable meaningful innovation the future

This has been the core vision of the work I have been doing in AI education. What started over a year ago with IBM approaching me and a series of brainstorming sessions has now become a significant part of IBM’s long-term collaboration with CBSE for sustainable and effective AI education.

Needless to say, I am very excited about where this is headed. Here’s to a world of truly inclusive and meaningful innovation leveraging AI