On Saturday, students from Longmont High School, or LHS, participated in St. Vrain Valley School District’s first DeepRacer Invitational, an Amazon Web Service Hackathon.
At the event, 16 students worked in teams of two to embed Artificial Intelligence, or AI, and reinforcement learning technologies into 1/18th scale race cars, also called DeepRacer.
Using software by Amazon Web Service, or AMS, the students applied AI to their DeepRacer in efforts to make the artificial car model perform autonomously, speedily and reliably in a series of races. Between races, teams spent time tweaking their car’s programming so that it would achieve more speed and consistency in the next round.
Although the student racers competed in categories of fastest, most reliable and most improved DeepRacer, no teams were disqualified from the tournament. Instead, the real purpose of the event was to provide students with the opportunity to work hands-on with AI and robotics, according to LHS senior Grayson Hubbell, who organized the entire event.
“This event combines robotics and AI,” said Hubbell. “We bring the two concepts together in this tournament and, for the students, this collaborative, fun and competitive environment helps them to learn, grow and be more knowledgeable about these fields.”
Another important learning aspect of this event came from teams documenting their programming process and “describing their improvements, failures and modifications they made to get their results,” Hubbell said. In this way, students were able to build their engineering notebooks, Hubbell explained.
For Axel Reitzig, director of innovation at the Innovation Center of St. Vrain Valley Schools, this event acted as a gate opener for students to become introduced to AI and robotics – two very important and relevant fields today, he said.
“Robotics is very powerful because it allows students who are still pretty concrete thinkers to understand abstract concepts. Machine learning is fairly abstract, so being able to train a robot helps them to really understand those core concepts,” Reitzig said.
“Once they can gain that confidence and experience (working with AI and robotics), we can lead them down a path where they can further expand and apply their knowledge,” Reitzig said.
SSVSD’s first DeepRacer Invitational on Saturday was a culmination of nearly three years of work by Hubbell, who has spearheaded an initiative, in partnership with SVVSD’s Innovation Center, to incorporate more opportunities for students to explore AI across the school district.
Throughout his high school career, Hubbell has been deeply involved in the Innovation Center’s and LHS’s robotics and AI teams. During the summer after his freshman year in 2019, Hubbell pitched an idea to SVVSD’s Superintendent Don Haddad about a plan to bring AI to more SVVSD classrooms over the next three years. Haddad granted him the opportunity.
Hubbell’s initiative was greeted by the City on a Cloud Grant by Amazon Web Service, or AWS, which allowed Hubbell to purchase AI products from the company and incorporate them into his efforts. Although he explored an abundance of AWS’s products, Hubbell landed on DeepRacer because “it’s easy and simple to use, and it really allows students and kids to jump on board and get going with AI,” he said.
In the future, Hubbell and Reitzig hope more SVVSD teachers will incorporate DeepRacer into their curriculums.
According to Reitzig, not only does DeepRacer provide newbies with a good starting point for learning AI – the company AWS also offers students the opportunity to earn a certification in industry services’ cloud operations.
“If students can earn and graduate with a certification (from AWS), they’re employable just like that,” Reitzig said with a snap.
“I’m really excited that this is something we can provide high school and maybe even middle school students with,” Reitzig said about AWS. “(With AWS’s support), we can really onboard them into a fascinating field that leads to really amazing opportunities for careers.”
Although Hubbell’s plan ultimately centers around creating a curriculum that SVVSD teachers can use in their classrooms to teach students from a young age about AI, a key component of his plan is fostering community engagement in AI through public events – which he was able to accomplish at Saturday’s DeepRacer Invitational.
“It’s all new but it’s been really awesome to see the kids have great success today,” Hubbell said. “We’re seeing them struggle and succeed throughout this process, but they’re also learning and growing.”
