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Help Communities Solve Real-World Problems with AI – Becomea Technovation Mentor!Tara Chklovski (Founder and CEO, Technovation; Tara@technovation.org)DOI: 10.1145/3362077.3362080

Abstract

Join other AI professionals as a mentor inTechnovation’s AI program for families. Shareyour expertise with adults and children whoare curious about artificial intelligence andhow it can be used to address real issues intheir communities. Help people all around theworld learn to not only use AI, but to createsolutions with AI that improve their lives andtheir communities.

Technovation Families

Technovation, a global technology educationnonprofit, is seeking mentors for its sec-ond season of Technovation Families, an AI-focused program for families with childrenages 8-13. Join peers working in ComputerScience fields and be part of the world’slargest AI mentoring program. Support fami-lies around the world as they learn about AIand develop AI-based prototypes addressingproblems they identify in their communities.

Started in 2018, Technovation Families’ AIchallenge brings families, schools, communi-ties, and mentors together to learn, play, andcreate with AI. They apply what they learn tosolve a real-world problem in their commu-nity as part of a global competition. Mentorsguide learners of all ages through Neural Net-works, data, self-driving car algorithms, andmachine learning and training models to rec-ognize images, text, and emotions through anIBM-Watson based platform Machine Learn-ing for Kids. Local educators and CS expertsoffer encouragement and guidance through-out as families learn about – and use – AI toolsfor the first time. Mentors especially are a criti-cal touch-point for families who are developingtheir confidence as problem solvers and inven-tors, and who have big ideas for applying AI tocommunity problems, but lack technical knowl-edge, experience, and confidence in their abil-ities. Mentors are able to volunteer remotely,

Copyright c© 2019 by the author(s).

thereby strengthening local capacity in areasthat may not have access to technology pro-fessionals or universities.

In the first year of Technovation Families’ AIcompetition, 7,500 people across 70 chap-ters in 13 countries participated, developing200 AI-based solutions to problems in theircommunities. These solutions ranged fromimage-recognition software that scans chil-dren’s drawings for signs of bullying and awearable swimming cap for kids to detect earlysigns of drowning, to a tool to detect and re-move invasive algae from a local lake (Figure1 and Figure 2).

Figure 1: Jeff Dean (Head of Google Brain) lis-tening to a father and son team describing theirimage-recognition prototype that emits ultrasonicfrequencies when it sees a dog.

Figure 2: Six coaches from Bolivia, Palestine,Spain, United States, Pakistan and Kazakhstanwho coached their communities to create winningAI-based inventions.

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Technovation partners with industry leadersincluding Google, NVIDIA, Intel, General Mo-tors, and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation,to bridge the AI knowledge and confidencegap for children and adults around the world(Figure 3).

Figure 3: Mother and sons from Bolivia explainingto a judge how their Raspberry-Pi powered, imagerecognition system sucks up invasive weeds fromLake Titicaca.

The Technovation Families program is built ona community-based model that involves par-ents and caregivers so that the adults (in ad-dition to the children) can reignite their curios-ity and develop as lifelong learners. After par-ticipating in the program, more than 91% ofthe parents surveyed believed their child de-veloped a sustained interest and growing in-terest in AI and ∼85% of parents wanted tocontinue investing effort into improving theirlocal communities (Chklovski, Jung, Fofang, &Gonzales, 2019).

Mentors benefit too. Through Technovation’sprograms, mentors’ communications and pre-sentation skills improve, as do their profes-sional relationships with colleagues and lead-ers. And, their work with Technovation partic-ipants stretches and grows their creativity, or-ganizational, and project management skills.

Recently, the second season of TechnovationFamilies launched debuting an expanded cur-riculum developed in partnership with a com-mittee of AI researchers, and industry profes-sionals. The updated curriculum includes ad-ditional information about AI, good and baddatasets, machine learning and ethical inno-vation (Figure 4 and Figure 5). Through 10fun, hands-on lessons, families learn founda-tional AI concepts, identify a meaningful prob-

lem to solve in their local community, and buildan AI agent to solve it. Sign-up today to helpfamilies make the world a better place with AI!

Figure 4: First 5-weeks of project-based Techno-vation Families AI curriculum that introduces learn-ers to AI, Machine Learning, and building Imageand Text Recognition Systems.

Figure 5: Last 5-weeks of the Technovation Fami-lies AI curriculum that helps participants apply theirlearning to create AI-based prototypes that ad-dress problems in their community.

ReferencesChklovski, T., Jung, R., Fofang, J. B., & Gon-

zales, P. (2019). Implementing a 15-week ai-education program with under-resourced families across 13 global com-munities. In International joint confer-ence on artificial intelligence, macau.

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Tara Chklovsk TaraChklovski is CEO andfounder of global techeducation nonprofit Tech-novation. A frequentadvocate for STEM edu-cation, she’s presented atthe White House STEMInclusion Summit, SXSWEDU, UNESCO’s MobileLearning Week, and ledthe education track atthe 2019 UN AI for Good

Global Summit.

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