The promise of AI 4 All is being realized at NEOM
The Reality of Neom Community School (NCS)
By: Joel Wilson, Sultan Albarakati & Rooz Aliabadi
While the city of Neom, Saudi Arabia, part of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, has yet to be built, a vision of its novel educational focus is already well-established. Founded in 2021, Neom Community School (NCS) serves around 150 pre-kindergarten through 8th-grade students. With plans to expand the school’s enrollment and begin offering high school programming in 2022, NCS approaches the task of creating a blueprint for what the educational framework will be in Saudi Arabia’s futuristic new megacity. In conjunction with one of Vision 2030 stated goals of the Human Capability and Development Program, including “ensur[ing] that citizens have the required capabilities to compete globally by instilling values and developing basic and future skills,” NCS seeks to establish a new paradigm: AI for all. Having partnered with ReadyAI, the first comprehensive K-12 AI education company to create an “out of the box ready” and complete program to teach AI, NCS is poised to empower a generation of learners — native Saudis and the children of those who immigrate to the futuristic metropolis — with an understanding of how AI works, how they can use it to create an open and transformative future, and how it can harness it to create a better and more inclusive world.
NCS currently offers AI education in two avenues. First, in students’ home classrooms, AI is integrated with Units of Inquiry, frameworks that guide study periods at the developing school. Thus, as students learn about the human body, they learn about AI’s role in diagnosing diseases, blending traditional core subjects such as biology with practical computer science education, given the continual influence computer science has on just about every field. As a result, AI is no longer a subject reserved for only a particular group of students, namely economically privileged students in affluent countries.
AI is not just reserved for older students studying biology, however. The integration of AI education with students’ home classrooms spans the grade levels of Neom Community School. For instance, younger students, such as those in Kindergarten or Grade 1, are learning about patterns. With their homeroom teacher, they learn about pattern recognition in terms of shapes, numbers, colors, etc. However, integration with an AI 4 All curriculum is promised to every student at NCS students also learn how computers recognize patterns. Students receive a fundamental primer on neural networks and apply their understanding of neural networks to what are commonly called unplugged activities, such as identifying the patterns that an artificial intelligence system would use to predict human drawings. Then, students engage these ideas through a plugged tool such as Google’s Quick, Draw! In this game, they watch how the AI system uses a well-trained neural network to predict human drawings based on thousands of previous users’ drawings of the same item, a cat or a lamp, or an airplane, among other possible concepts.
In this example, the promise of AI 4 All is being realized at NCS, as the school’s teachers and its stakeholders seek to train even the youngest learners at the school about artificial intelligence systems that continue to predict human behavior and thought. Such lessons can be scaffolded to teach how businesses use AI to recommend products, songs, and streaming entertainment to millions of users worldwide. Such awareness also elicits discussions on societal impact and AI ethics, debates fundamental for the next generation of learners, be they AI scientists, computer programmers, or none of the above.
In fact, during a recent visit to Neom, ReadyAI teachers met with third graders who had just completed a Unit of Inquiry that focused on marketing. After producing cereals and marketing them to other school grade levels, students refined their products using feedback. However, the introduction of bias complicated this learning, as it was discussed how humans may not necessarily always provide true statements out of various kinds of bias, including contextual bias and other forms of unconscious bias. Thus, students were asked how a more accurate assessment of someone’s impression of a product could be obtained. Through some prompting, students understood that somatic cues might offer more insights into people’s thinking than what they verbalize. Using this context, students were introduced to AI in marketing, which allowed them to explore how AI systems can subtly read facial features and thus produce estimates of individuals’ emotional states. After playing with this feature and an app built by Visage Technologies, students created simple programming in Calypso, a simple tile-based user interface to teach robot logic and behavior, to have a computerized system respond to individuals’ emotional states. It was also noted that more sophisticated systems could identify what students are looking at in marketing, allowing the producers of advertising campaigns to determine what aspects of a commercial or visual ad are garnering the most attention.
Once again, it should be noted this all took place in a third-grade classroom. Such understanding of AI technology does not discuss in most K-12 education programs, and indeed few undergraduate programs in marketing, advertising, or business would feature such a curriculum. However, this is Neom. This is AI 4 All.
For students who are ready for a more robust understanding of AI and wish to have some more hands-on engagement with it, students also can engage in lines of inquiry regarding AI and to work in an AI lab set up by ReadyAI, where students use Calypso to engage major concepts in AI. Through regular interaction in NCS’s Extracurricular Activities (ECA) program, students are introduced to a host of 21st-century skills, including but not limited to AI. These ECAs allow those who wish to delve deeper into AI to gain experience with it through a simple coding language that permits sophisticated computer interactions and engages major AI functions, including landmark-based navigation, object recognition, manipulation speech recognition, and speech generation.
Beginning with grades four and beyond, students can take up to three levels of AI education using Calypso and Cozmo, an AI-powered robot. Students learn about the laws governing the programming language and other major concepts in computer science, including state machines, complex logic, and computer vision. Moreover, students demonstrate their learning through activity-based education. Students create short programs in conjunction with an NCS teacher who has developed a lesson in partnership with ReadyAI. Then, after making the short scripted program, students are often tasked with creating a new program that replicates similar concepts but requires them to connect previous learning. For instance, after learning about object recognition and AI-powered navigation, students have to create a fireperson simulation where Cozmo acts as a firefighter and puts out fires, represented by red cubes. Cozmo, thanks to the students’ programming, attends to the fires and puts them out as cubes turn red and catch on fire.
Such activity-based learning then leads to project-based learning, where students are tasked with presenting their projects that address community needs either in Neom or their own regions of the country or the world. After completing the intermediate program, for instance, one student proposed a “Search and Rescue” AI-powered robot that could assist those who were lost in the desert surrounding Neom. This robot would navigate around the desert, perhaps using human-controlled teleoperation. However, using the powerful vision produced by the robot, it could readily identify markers that humans in distress may have set up to assist in their rescue. Students created a simulated area where they could teleoperate with Cozmo and rely on the AI system to look for markers that indicated where humans may have expressed their need for rescue, something that human eyes could easily miss. This student then presented his project in front of parents, teachers, and Neom stakeholders, helping him and others who presented to develop needed ‘soft’ skills of public speaking and poise and demonstrating proficiency with complicated computer science concepts. Such project-based learning empowers students to identify needs and concerns they have and recognize how AI could be used to help address those issues, thus democratizing AI and demonstrating the potential of its implementation in all students’ educations.
While NCS has been in operation for less than a year, and its student population is currently small, its aspiration for a true 21st-century education inclusive of AI in day-to-day classroom material through extracurricular activities and from kindergarten through pre-college has started to see fruition. As Saudi Arabia seeks to bring about its ambitious plan to bring about a world-class city where there is currently a desert, one founded on sustainability, inclusivity, and progressivism, it has already begun the work in its youngest citizens, those learning about AI in their classrooms at NCS. As a result of these educational veins offered by NCS, students here now and those to soon follow are poised to engage AI and contribute to its impact on Neom, Saudi Arabia, and beyond.
This article was written by Joel Wilson (joel.wilson@readyai.org). Sultan Albarakati (sultan.albarakati@neom.com) and Rooz Aliabadi (rooz@readyai.org) contributed to this piece.
To learn more about ReadyAI visit www.readyai.org or email us at info@readyai.org
