“The course offerings at the high school level just weren’t challenging enough,” Kiyoi said. “So, we created this opportunity where it’s very open-ended, and we go after anything that’s an emerging technology.”
One standout project this year was an AI-powered fact-checker, which they tested on live debates leading up to the presidential election. While sources like The Washington Post and Snopes fact-check these events with human fact-checkers, when Kiyoi assigned the project, he had yet to see an effective automated tool do the work.
The project required students to learn about AI and large language models, but also to compile up-to-date information and problem-solve along the way.
“A lot of the AI databases weren’t updated with ongoing election stuff,” Harshita Keerthipati, a senior in the class, said. “When we would ask, ‘Who are the running candidates for this year?’ it wouldn’t give the right information.”
The students used thousands of news articles to train the fact-checker and used either speech-to-text technology or live transcriptions to identify and check statements. While the class saw political debates as one potential use case, the fact-checker could work on any claim. Kiyoi recalls testing the statement that the Earth is flat, which was successfully rebutted by the bot.
In the testing process, Abhinav Garg, another student in the class, said students had to overcome inherent issues with AI as a tool, like bias and hallucinations.
“The first time we tested it, and it finally worked, that was definitely a proud moment, that we were able to overcome that inherent limitation,” he said.
In September, when the students used the presidential debate as a live test run, they checked its results against their own fact-checking and found the tool showed 87 percent accuracy, Kiyoi said.
Kiyoi encourages student contributions to their education. While the fact-checking project was his idea, different groups of students took different approaches to how they created it.
“It helps me learn because I’m actually interested in something that I’m creating or doing,” said Coleson Franklin, a student in Kiyoi’s class.
One project students dreamed up on their own last year took on the issue of waste management. A 2019 study from nonprofit The Recycling Partnership found that 1 in 4 items are incorrectly placed in the recycling bin. A group of Kiyoi’s students created a prototype that identifies whether an item is trash, recyclable or compost materials, with lights indicating which bin is appropriate. The device performed well, and the students secured angel investing to continue working on their prototype and test it in the school lunchroom.
Currently, Garg said he is in a group working on a Morse code translator, which requires buzzers, transistors and resisters, all of which Mr. Kiyoi supplied.
“You don’t even worry about, ‘Oh, what can we make with what we have?’” Garg said. “You can kind of dream and create whatever we want to do.”
In addition to giving students the opportunity to interact with emerging technologies, the advanced class teaches soft skills like presentation, collaboration and organization. Two students, Garg and Keerthipati, have used their skills to secure internships at a cybersecurity company. They started with a two-month internship, largely spent shadowing meetings and examining websites, the students said. Both were offered yearlong contracts at the conclusion of the internship and now get experience working directly with clients.
“It was just learning how to do the basic stuff,” Keerthipati said. “Then we became apprentices, with more emphasis on cybersecurity, like penetration testing or how to update policies.”
Both Keerthipati and Garg said their experience in Kiyoi’s class helped prepare them for their professional experience.
“The fact that the community is giving trust to high school students to work on this technological level is pretty exciting,” Garg said.
