For four young students, the plane ride home from Dulles International Airport to McGhee Tyson Airport in Knoxville was quieter than one might expect.¶
Aaron Gallagher, Ayden Taverna, Emma Connor, Ryker Cochran, and their teacher, Hope McDonald, touched down on Tennessee soil once again at around 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday, greeted by about 40 people with signs and balloons. The students, fourth and fifth grade members of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Club at Alcoa Intermediate School, had just won the Presidential AI Challenge and a $10,000 prize at the White House the day before for their AI app concept, Homework Helper.¶
The Presidential AI Challenge has three tracks, the first of which does not require students to create an app or write code, only to flesh out an app idea. The Alcoa AI Club students, because of their ages, competed in this track. Across all three, there were more than 2,500 project submissions and more than 20,000 participants.¶
On their final day at the White House, the children had snacked on finger foods in the Rose Garden, listened to live music, and even met the First Lady, Melania Trump. By the next morning, they were exhausted.¶
At 52 years old and having been a teacher for more than 20 years, McDonald never dreamed she would ever get to go there with her students.¶
“We went 15 hours a day at this place,” McDonald said. “I mean, it was packed. It was kind of nice as a teacher, because I didn't have to make any decisions. I just said, ‘Tell me what to do,’ and we did it.”¶
How It Started
The Alcoa AI Club started out with about 35 members meeting after school each day, of whom only four were able to travel to Washington, D.C. McDonald spent the entire first week discussing what AI is and what it is not. After some trial and error, the students grasped the concept.¶
The students used Google Gemini, an “AI Assistant” that helps with writing, planning, and brainstorming, according to its website. A new project is called a “Gem.”¶
“They essentially were just telling Google Gemini what they wanted the Gem to do,” McDonald said.¶
What Is Homework Helper?
The students began conducting research in the community that’s located roughly 15 miles south of Knoxville and found that children in Alcoa struggled with math homework and that many did not have a parent who was sufficiently proficient to help them. From there, the Homework Helper idea emerged: an app that would give leading and guiding questions to help students work through their homework. Eventually, they broadened the app’s scope to include all subjects and not just math. McDonald said they were adamant about the app not just giving students the answers, and they explained that during their presentation at the White House.¶
“One of the students stepped up and said, ‘You know, we used AI on this project, but we didn't use it a whole lot,’” McDonald said. The student said he and his classmates did much of the thinking themselves and viewed AI as “the co-pilot” while they remained “the pilot.”¶
What would set Homework Helper apart from other study apps, such as Khan Academy’s Khanmigo, is a time-management feature. Students would be able to enter their homework and track how long it takes them to complete it, their extracurricular schedule for the week, and more, so the app can alert them when to do their homework to ensure they finish in time.¶
The club also received assistance from Dr. Anne Ho, the director of AI R&D at the University of Tennessee’s AI Tennessee initiative.¶
AI Tennessee works with partners across the state to ensure Tennessee leads AI education initiatives. One of its functions is to send education and AI experts into communities to help local schools with their program’s AI capabilities. During the first year of the Presidential AI Challenge, the organization reached out to various professors in the state to gauge their interest.¶
“AI is not standard school curriculum right now,” Dr. Ho said. “It's just too new, and even though we do have computer science standards in Tennessee now, this is something that's still developing. So, we knew at AI Tennessee that we needed to send some of our education and AI experts out into the community to help out our local schools.”¶
As she began to get to know the Alcoa AI Club students, she became increasingly convinced they were onto something.¶
“From someone who has watched these kids present several times now, I was really impressed, especially for their age group, that they were also doing a little research about stress for students, and they were really thinking about managing stress for kids of their peer age group,” Dr. Ho said.¶
Homework Helper’s Future
Now that Homework Helper has taken home first prize in its track at the Presidential AI Challenge, McDonald said the children will continue working on it in hopes that it enters the development stage. UT has filed for a grant to fund the app’s development, but they are “in the waiting stage,” now, according to Dr. Ho. She is optimistic about their chances.¶
“(The students) totally get it,” Dr. Ho said. “They're in school to learn, and they actually started on paper, from just brainstorming ideas before they even jumped into playing around with some AI tools. So, I think, given the initial ideas, the initial training about what AI is, kids can come up with so many amazing ideas that we can't even think of.”¶
But the students weren’t the only ones who learned something from the experience.¶
“I was very skeptical when it came to AI,” McDonald said. “After this project, I feel comfortable as an educator using AI. I feel comfortable, making sure that it is taught the right way and using it as a tool rather than the answer.”¶
