Artificial intelligence is the future of science and technology, and high school students are the future of Houston.
On Sept. 10, the future of Houston was introduced to the future of technology at the SCRATCH-ing the Surface: College Empowerment Day sponsored by the Rice University Office of STEM Engagement (R-STEM).
Sixty high school students from Worthing High School, Alief Early College High School, KIPP Sunnyside High School and KIPP Northeast High School came to Rice University to explore how machine learning is being used to develop the next generation of wearable technologies.
The students conducted experiments to understand how new devices will impact human health. The students then toured the campus and attended a roundtable discussion led by Rice Empower, an undergraduate student club that promotes STEM in local high schools. The discussions focused on topics ranging from Rice admissions and student life to financial aid and the college application process.
The culminating activity and highlight of the day was the artificial intelligence techniques that the students had a chance to explore. Using the Scratch platform, students were introduced to supervised machine learning techniques and allowed to train various models using Dale Lane’s Machine Learning for Kids: A Project-Based Introduction to Artificial Intelligence text and suite of lessons. The day concluded with students discussing the exceptional programs they had produced.
You can’t be what you can’t see. We aimed to recruit high school students of color to speak with Rice students of color and be taught machine learning lessons by teachers of color during this event. We were intentional about letting these kids envision Rice University as a possible college choice, see computer science as an attainable major and have role models that they could identify with leading the event.
— Allen Antoine
The event was organized by R-STEM, the Greater Houston Chapter of the Computer Science Teachers Association and the Scratch Foundation. These groups work to increase the participation of K–12 students in coding and computational thinking spaces.
Allen Antoine, associate director for mathematics and computer science at R-STEM, said the event was designed to encourage students of color to pursue a career in STEM.
“You can’t be what you can’t see. We aimed to recruit high school students of color to speak with Rice students of color and be taught machine learning lessons by teachers of color during this event,” he said. “We were intentional about letting these kids envision Rice University as a possible college choice, see computer science as an attainable major and have role models that they could identify with leading the event.”
This work was funded by the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Precise Advanced Technologies and Health Systems for Underserved Populations Engineering Research Center, whose mission is to develop advanced, cost-effective technologies to prevent, delay the onset of, and manage diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and the NSF’s Expeditions in Computing Engineering Research Center, whose mission is to develop a computational imaging system, called Computational Photo-Scatterography, that effectively unravels scattered light and facilitates noninvasive bioimaging deep beneath the skin at cellular-level resolutions.
— Carolyn Nichol
Director
Rice Office of STEM Engagement