Should you send your kid to AI summer camp?
Yes — at least according to my unscientific polling of educators and parents, and executives at companies who plan on hiring AI-educated talent for years to come.
Generative AI tools including Midjourney, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Adobe’s Firefly, and ElevenLabs’ text-to-audio converter are already showing how the tech will transform industries and occupations — from computer programming to animation, as you’ll see in some of the news below. So If you’re looking for guidance on what you should be doing to help your children get ready for an AI-assisted world, summer camp might be a worthwhile starting place.
“AI as a science is not incorporated into the curriculum and we’re years away from that happening because those are changes that have to be made at the state education level,” said Stacy Hawthorne, chief academic officer for Learn21, a nonprofit that develops educational tech for K-12 schools. “Students that aren’t having exposure to AI in a critical thinking capacity are literally going to be further behind than they are right now.”
Today, just seven states have official guidance on how to approach AI in education: California, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia. A handful of others are in the process of developing AI guidelines.
Hawthorne pointed me to TeachAI.org, a coalition of more than 60 tech companies and education and government organizations, associations and researchers. They banded together in early 2023 to provide free toolkits and resources for school leaders, staff and policymakers on how to develop programs and policies around AI in schools. She also shared an annotated bibliography of AI resources compiled by Learn21.
There are even more resources at AI4K12.org, a nonprofit working to develop national guidelines for K-12 education on AI. The group is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Carnegie Mellon University School…
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