AI for Kids

Fan Favorites Replay: How a Puzzle-Loving Kid Became an Expert in AI and Robotics (Middle+)

• Amber Ivey (AI) • Season 3 • Episode 17

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This week, we’re sharing a fan-favorite replay, an episode that ranks in the top ten of our all-time most listened-to episodes. In this week's replay episode we unlock the secrets of building adaptive, personalized robots with Dr. Randi Williams, a leading figure in AI and robotics, as she shares her journey from a math-obsessed child inspired by Jimmy Neutron to a pioneering expert aiming to make technology fairer and more inclusive.

Dr. Williams takes us behind the scenes of her work at the Algorithmic Justice League (AJL), discussing the triumphs and challenges of creating robots that can truly engage with humans.

Through the lens of projects like PopBots, you’ll discover how even preschoolers can grasp foundational AI concepts and start innovating from an early age. Hear the inspiring story of a young learner who programmed a multilingual robot, and explore the engaging tools and platforms like MIT’s Playground that make learning AI fun and accessible.

Finally, we tackle the crucial issue of algorithmic bias and the importance of diverse data sets in AI training. This episode underscores how creativity and a passion for learning can drive meaningful advancements in AI and robotics.
 
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Amber Ivey:

Hi everyone, welcome back to AI for kids. Today we have an amazing guest, and I'm so excited to be interviewing Dr. Randy Williams, a recent graduate from the MIT Media Lab and an expert in using technology to uplift communities. Dr. Williams, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what do you love the most about working with technology?

SPEAKER_01:

Oh my gosh, hi Amver. So great to be with you. Hi, everyone. Can you hear me? Test test. This is awesome.

Amber Ivey:

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

So I'm Dr. Randy Williams, as you heard. And what I do is I build AI and robots, and I study how people react to those technologies because I find it really fascinating a to build things. I love building things. But also I'm like, when people get to interact with something that you build, that is so exciting. And I started doing that, you know, one of my first projects growing up when I first learned how to program. So this is high school, when I learned how to make a game. I spent a lot of time making games and then finding people in my house to play the games that I made, maybe you know, torturing them a little bit, but saying, you know, come try this, come try this. But I would say that it really sparked my excitement about computer science. It sparked my creativity. Now I get to do it as my job. So where I work is a nonprofit. It's called Algorithmic Justice League. Like, you know, Justice League, superheroes, or just AJL. And at AJL, we're all about using art and research to build a more equitable, more inclusive future with AI. Now, right before that, I was actually a graduate student at MIT. So that's where I did all the robotics and AI work. And along the way, I've also worked at places like Microsoft and NASA and Lego and Scratch. So a big mix of technology as well as doing the creative side. So yeah, that's that's kind of who I am, and I'm really happy that I have a career that lets me do both of those things.

Amber Ivey:

Before we jump into the interview, I really want to dig back into when you were a child. What was your favorite thing to do when you were a kid? What was your favorite subject? And that you always love making things and learning about technology.

SPEAKER_01:

I will say that I did. So I was definitely a math person growing up, and I really liked to do puzzles like Sudoku. I was always curious about how things worked, and I like to take things apart, and sometimes I could put them back together, but not always. But I also had lots of diverse interests. So I played sports all the way growing up, I played piano since the age of nine. Actually, Alicia Keys with her braids, you know, I was like, I want to be just like that when I grow up. So, how did I bring all of this together? Well, you know, I love building things, I love exploring how they work, but I also give myself a chance to express my creative side and my artistic side. And so building robots was my way to do that because my robots, we'll talk about this later. They're super cute, they're so cute, and that makes them easier for people to engage with and to want to get to know them. And really, I think you know that kind of well-roundedness that helps with problem solving and you know just being passionate about learning new things.

Amber Ivey:

I absolutely love that. I love that you bring in both like the math brain and the creative side because sometimes you feel like there aren't a lot of careers that allow you to do both, but you've taken a damn math-focused career and brought in creativity, and I absolutely love that. If you could build an AI tool, what would it do and why? Well, that's such a big question.

SPEAKER_01:

I've built a lot of AI tools to solve different problems. Oh, yeah. But there's a show that I watched growing up called Jimmy Neutron. Super tiny guy with huge orange hair, and he had a robot dog named Goddard. And Goddard's job was to just hang out with Jimmy, go on all the adventures, help him adapt to different situations and solve different problems. And this actually reflects a lot of what we see today with AI. People are building AI companions that can help lots of problems. Maybe they can offer care to people, tell them jokes if they're feeling sad, or help them do chores if they don't want to do their chores or need help with their chores. And in my robotics lab, we actually think about doing that. We try and build robots that are specifically meant to help people. But what I think we really need robots anyone can build, and then it's like your personal just for you. Maybe it's a dog, maybe it's a cat, but you know, it could be anything you can imagine, and it's yours. In AI, we call that personalization, which is when you have a robot that really understands you and can adapt to your preferences and to your wants and to your needs. But then that second part, being able to solve different problems, that's called generalizability. So you have to make a machine that can learn to take on new tasks and solve them alongside of you. These are two big problems in AI, but I think that as we learn more and more, we're gonna get closer to these super personalized, perfect companion, Goddard the robot dog like robots.

Amber Ivey:

I'm actually very excited about that. And I like the idea of being able to create your own robot and being able to personalize it to who you are as a person. Like that idea is great. I do want a robot that cleans for me and cooks for me, like tomorrow. Right. So whenever you figure that out, sign me up. Let me be the first in line for sure. Right, as soon as possible. But you also grew up in a place called Prince George's County. How did your community inspire your love for engineering and social change?

SPEAKER_01:

My family's actually from Baltimore, but you know, Prince George's County. We we love to claim DC. And so my family they came up to Baltimore as part of the Great Migration and just this long history of having people who are educators and community organizers. In fact, my great grandma, who's a lifelong educator in Baltimore, has a street named after her, Rosie Keene.

Amber Ivey:

Amazing. My family also came up during the Great Migration.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, huge sense of responsibility that I think both of those communities offer. That if you have a talent, then give it to your community. Be in community with others and share what you have, accept help from other people. It actually reminds me of my favorite quote, which is from Michelle Obama, which says, you know, you need to have three people in your life. A, someone ahead of you who is like showing you the way and clearing paths, B, someone beside you who can walk along with you and take those journeys, and then C, someone who you're pulling up, someone that you're offering mentorship to, you're reaching back for others and pulling them along. And so that was something that I was not only told, but that I really got to live. So many people, my teachers especially, invested in me. And that just inspired why I want to do robots that help other people because I'm thinking about my community. Can you tell us about one of your favorite projects where you've got to do it? Yes. So now we get to talk about the key robots, which I'm so excited about. So there's this project that I worked on called Pop Bots, like POP bots. And the whole point of this project was to teach preschoolers about AI so that when people told me that they thought AI was too hard and complicated, I could say, nope, I've taught some four-year-olds about it, so you can learn it too. But really, I think it's important to break down barriers to learning about AI. And there's also this fascinating thing that happens. When I started the project, the coolest AI out there was Alexa. If you think about it, you know, imagine when I was a kid. In order to search the internet, I had to know how to read, write, type, and then I could search the internet. But all of a sudden, there were these four-year-olds who were like, Oh, I can search the internet, watch this. Hey Alexa, like, what's the weather? Or like, where's the clothes? And I was just like, this is fascinating. How can they do this? How is your life different if you grow up with just like the full internet at your hands, literally at the man of your voice? So I was studying those two things. One, what happens when you give a four-year-old this powerful technology? And two, can we help those four-year-olds actually learn about the technology and build it themselves? So, over the course of two months, I got to teach more than a hundred students and their teachers about different kinds of AI. I taught them about how AI can learn as it interacts with you through playing a game, rock, paper, scissors. I taught them about how AI can make predictions. Let's say that you're at a grocery store and you want to teach a robot to help you pick the best foods. Well, first you have to teach it something about the foods, and then you don't want to teach it every fruit, that'll take forever. Um, so after you teach it a few foods, then it could guess. It's like, oh, you told me that blueberries are delicious. Bananas are like blueberries because they're both fruits. So are bananas also delicious? Should I get some bananas for you? And these kinds of lessons, you know, worked really well for preschoolers. But what's even cooler was they got to build their own robots. So imagine this the robot face and brain was a cell phone, literally the thing out of your pocket. And then the robot body was Lego. That is actually so cool. That's how the Lego thing came about. Yeah. Because I was thinking, you know, robots are so cool, but a lot of them are really expensive. So, how do I make it easier for anyone to be able to do this? So I built this robot with a cell phone face and brain, and you know, it has cameras and microphones, all the things you need. And then this Lego body.

Amber Ivey:

I love that. Why do you think it's so important for kids to learn about AI and how can it help them with their future?

SPEAKER_01:

So after I worked with Pop Bots and teaching preschoolers, I was like, well, I want this to go everywhere because you know, there's this common argument, which I agree with, which is that AI is the future, and it's just like increasingly used in more and more and more ways in the world. And so I think it's important for everyone to just learn a little bit so that they can be like ahead of what's happening, they can be informed and make good decisions whether you're buying it or building it or using it. You know, you gotta know what's going on. That could lead to, you know, career opportunities, jobs. You also learn about problem solving. But I'd say the best reason for this is because you want people to know how to think creatively, and you want to people to know how to be innovative and to take a technology around them like a self-owned robot and then build something that they think is cool. I had one preschooler who knew three different languages, and he taught his robot to speak multiple different languages, and then it had like three heads. Creative, innovative, I think that's so important. I literally built things that I wish I had when I was younger. With the project with tens of thousands of people, one of the best things about it was that it was totally free. So you can go online to playground.raise.mit.edu. That's a lot of words, but we'll type it out for you. And then you'll be able to use machine learning in your scratch projects. So that was what we wanted people to be able to do to literally have the building blocks of AI and to be able to create whatever they want. You can make your computer talk to you and listen to you and recognize your face, all with the idea being that there's a project idea that you might have or a game you want to play or an idea that you want to explore. And so we want it to be as easy as possible for people to do that.

Amber Ivey:

That is so cool, and it's so cool you also use Scratch because I know a lot of young people do use scratch and that technology. Is that something you recommend kids start at when they're thinking about AI? And like if folks are thinking about, oh, I want a Pop Bot, how do I do that myself? Like, where should I go? Of course, I'm gonna drop the link in the show notes. That is a great question.

SPEAKER_01:

Of course, definitely start with Playground. Go to the show notes, check out Playground. You could tell your teacher about Day of AI, which, if you've heard of Hour of Code, it's similar to that, but essentially it's classroom lessons that your teacher can do, and of course they're all free. And this is put together by MIT researchers who said, we want more people to explore AI. They don't have to know how to program, but you know, there are different hands-on things that they can do. One of the activities which I like always talk about, always recommend, is to go and like try and break AI because it's so interesting. The ways that it thinks differently than like we think. So you can log on to your favorite chat bot. It could be Alexa, it could be on your phone, it could be Chat GPT, and try and figure out how to ask questions in a way where it gives you an answer you don't expect. A long time ago, this was called the Turing test. And this was how computer scientists, Alan Turing being one of them, wanted to test whether an artificial intelligence was sufficiently intelligent or not by trying to ask tricky questions and get it to answer in ways that sounded less and less human. So you can run your own Turing test with your favorite chat bot, and that'll help you understand a little bit more about what's going on inside. And then there are other resources, yeah, that are increasingly coming out.

Amber Ivey:

I never thought about the idea of having kids run their own Turing tests or trying to figure out if you can convince someone that AI is close to human, pushing it to his boundaries, test it to see how human it can sound. Would you mind playing a little game with me called Tech Trivia?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

Amber Ivey:

I'm gonna start with the first question: true or false? AI needs humans' help to make decisions, true or false.

SPEAKER_01:

Tricky, but I'm gonna say true most of the time. AI can't do a lot of things by itself.

Amber Ivey:

Ding, ding, ding, ding. You got it right. Yes, AI still needs human, whether it's training, algorithm, or what have you. We're not at the point of API or any other terminator and beyond. But question number two What do we call it when AI unfairly favors one group of people over another?

SPEAKER_01:

Tricky one, but I'm gonna say that's called algorithmic bias.

Amber Ivey:

You gotta write again. And can you explain it a little bit more in depth? Because like this is a space where you work in heavily. Can you share in a way that a kid would understand what that means even further than the question? Yes, of course. So algorithmic bias. They learn algorithms before, so I do want to give you that. So we have like an A for algorithm.

SPEAKER_01:

Awesome. Okay, I was gonna say that's so helpful. If you already know algorithms, then that's a good start. So imagine a computer system, but then it does this thing called bias. Usually we say that only humans can be biased, right? And that's like if you say, Oh, girls are better at math than boys, that's technically a bias because you don't know how all girls and all boys perform at math. Or if you have a bias where you're like, oh, only people who speak three different languages can be good roboticists. That is also a bias. We see these biases all around us in society. So think very carefully. You know, are you aware of some biases that others may have, that you may have? Because computers really need people to be able to do things, they actually can pick up and reflect that same bias that humans display. Super important example of this. I mentioned that I worked at Algorithmic Justice League. And the sort of origin story of our nonprofit is that the founder, Dr. Joy, was doing a computer project. She's also a computer scientist, so she wanted to build a mirror that could recognize a face and then overlay a lion if she needed, you know, courage, or overlay Serena Williams, if she needed to feel powerful. Call it the Aspire Mirror that helped her see what she wired to when she looked at it. But she had this problem because the facial recognition system, it couldn't find her face, like it kept saying there's no face in this. She's like, Okay, that's weird. And then it was Halloween, so she had a white mask and she put that on, and they were like, ah, yes, face. And she took the mask off and it was like no face. And what was happening behind the scenes was Dr. Joy is also a woman with a darker skin tone like mine. And so literally the algorithm had the bias that it couldn't see darker skin tones. And from there, Dr. Joy was able to do a whole research project and point it out to big companies and point it out to governments and say, hey, this is a big issue. Algorithms can have the same bias that humans do. And if you're wondering how that happened, it's because there weren't enough faces that looked like mine and Dr. Joy's inside of the code that was used to create that algorithm. And so we needed to do better because algorithms can learn the same kinds of discrimination that people will have sometimes.

Amber Ivey:

Oops, now we know. On her book cover, she has a picture of a white mask. I didn't know the meaning behind that. So thank you for sharing the meaning behind that. And we'll also drop the book in the show notes. I think it's called Unmasking Bias or Unmasking AI. AI, yeah, great job. Yeah, you got it. I know, but I couldn't remember exactly.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, definitely in addition to trying the programming things, like there are books, unmasking AI being one. There's a documentary about AJL on Netflix. It's called Coded Bias.

Amber Ivey:

So there's many ways to learn more about AI, even reading and watching TV. Thank you for that. And I'll definitely drop all those in the show notes for folks who are interested in learning more because if you're thinking about AI, we have to think about AI bias. One more question, and then we'll go back to our interview. Are you ready? Okay. True or false? AI has feelings like humans.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, this is so tricky, too. I'm gonna say false only because it doesn't have to be like what do you think? Am I right or wrong?

Amber Ivey:

We don't know what is happening in that machine. Right now we know it's not like a human. So we also agree that that's false. If you disagree, I would love to hear additional thoughts as well.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Well, I'd also love to hear you send in your thoughts about whether AI feels like humans. But one thing that's really interesting. So I mentioned that I worked in a robotics lab at MIT. It's called the Personal Robots Group, and we literally built social robots as in robots that can understand emotions and that can reflect emotions. And it turns out that's really powerful because when we talk, we do all these things like we nod and we smile and we go, uh and pin technology reflects those same social cues when it looks sad or when it makes art sounds. That was very popular with the preschool, but actually helps us understand it better. So those things are important, even if it's a little different than how we would do it.

Amber Ivey:

One other thing that I love about the work that you do is you focus on creating something called inclusive AI. Yeah. Can you explain what that means and why it's important?

SPEAKER_01:

Yes. Inclusive AI. That's all about designing a system that works for everyone fairly, regardless of their background or abilities or what they're coming to the table with. So, why does inclusive AI matter? Actually, it matters for everything that you build, every kind of technology. Did you know that when cars first came out, there were a lot of car accidents with women and children where the women and children would get really hurt? And it was because the seat belts weren't designed with women and children in mind. There were only guy engineers, you know, with they're like, yeah, we'll put it like at this height and at this width, and it'll work for everyone. And then it just didn't work for this entire group of people. So to make it more inclusive, they realized we need to have people who are testing this, who have different body sizes, who are different ages, people who are in wheelchairs, people who may or may not sit in the seat the way that you would expect. By doing that, you can prevent algorithmic bias and ensure that the technology is fair and accessible to multiple different people.

Amber Ivey:

That is wild. I think I've heard about the seatbelt, but I didn't realize that part of it, or similar stories. But it's interesting when you're talking about the AI piece. But continue.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I was thinking, like now I should give an example that's relevant to AI.

Amber Ivey:

Go for it.

SPEAKER_01:

I think I'm gonna go with the one that's almost like the seatbelt thing, but a little bit different. When smart speakers first came out, they were really bad with well, they're still pretty bad with children's voices. I know that by experience, but they're really bad with women's voices too, because they were tested again by people with deep low voices, and then you know, just Alex and Ziri just couldn't hear you. So again, they realized okay, when we collect data and we're using our data to give our smart speaker examples of what a voice sounds like, we have to have a wide range of voices in there. We have to have different accents. Still working on that. Oh, yeah. We have to have people from different parts of different places, like you know, English, Scottish English, Baltimore English, you know.

Amber Ivey:

That is a thing, folks.

SPEAKER_01:

Um, and that's how they make it inclusive.

Amber Ivey:

That is so cool. I did not realize that. Like I've heard things around like what it means to notice like complexion. Of skin, but I didn't think about even the pitch of the voice. That an AI, if it wasn't trained on that pitch, my voice is a little bit deeper. So I didn't have any problems. But for people who have a higher pitch voice, right, they may not have been hurt by that because they weren't trained on that. That is so interesting. I want to talk to you a little bit more about how do you think about using AI and robotics to help communities and make a positive impact?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I got to do a lot of work teaching teachers to teach AI, and that just brought me much closer to all of the things that teachers have to worry about. And this is during 2020. So teachers have extra things to worry about, 2020 and beyond.

Amber Ivey:

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Such as, you know, they work really hard. You have so many students, you have to grade the work, you have to personalize your lessons to what they want. You want to spark creativity, respond to different students' needs. And so I started thinking about well, couldn't you have a robot that helps with some of those tasks? And what should that robot do? Because there's a lot of so this is not inclusive AI. Okay. A lot of people will say, I was a student once. I know exactly what teachers need. So let me build the thing. So rather than do that, I asked teachers, what do you need? You're the expert on your students and how they learn. What could you use in the classroom that would help you? And then I sort of built that through, okay, what's actually possible to build?

unknown:

Because not everything possible.

SPEAKER_01:

So I was teaching AI, right? So it was a robot that would argue with you. One student wanted to build a robot that would deliver food around their house. So it could drive and deliver food and say, here are your chips, and then like drive away.

Amber Ivey:

Again, another robot I need.

SPEAKER_01:

And I would always ask students, okay, this seems like a cool idea. What are some of the ways that could go wrong? And they would say, There are no ways it could go wrong. It's perfect. The skill that teachers really wanted their students to practice was critical thinking. How do you sort of problem solve and say, what are the things that aren't immediately obvious that could come up? And how do I take steps to get there? So we built a robot that could argue with them. Oh, okay, well, your robot delivers snacks, but what if it means that you don't get enough exercise because you're not getting up and getting your snacks anymore? Or it delivers snacks, but what if you get a soda and it spills on the robot and then what? And what that did was it made people much more creative because they were like, oh, I shouldn't just build a robot. I should build a robot with a cup holder that's waterproof or soda proof so that it'll be able to be more flexible inside of different scenarios. That was really, really important for them as their engineering seat to be able to think through how I might design this even better. Because we don't always get the perfect solution the first time. And that was really helpful for teachers because they couldn't have 30 different conversations with all of the students.

Amber Ivey:

That's such a cool idea, the idea of creating, even for other things, of creating an AI that is able to go back and forth with you. And one thing we always talk about here is problem solving. So thank you for like giving an example of where parents and teachers are concerned that AI is going to stop things like creativity and problem solving. But that's a way you can use AI to help with problem solving and help with the issue of, like you said, a teacher can't answer 30 to 100 questions per child, but this AI can actually speed that up and the teacher can focus where the teacher needs to to help further that problem solving. I absolutely love that. Great examples. I'm learning so much today. Folks, even I am learning. Can I throw out a problem solving talent? Yeah, go for it.

SPEAKER_01:

Please, let's do it. Okay, so at first we were all really happy with the robot, but then we realized that it had one big limitation. AI has algorithmic bias, things like ChatGPT, which is what we build it on top of. They learn from Wikipedia and Quora and Reddit. So even though it knew a lot, it didn't know everything. And for some of the students we were working with, there was a group of students who were from rural Georgia. And they were like, I mean, it's kind of helpful, but I really wish that it were more aware of like what my life is like and could help me argue with that. So that's my problem-solving challenge. How would you make something like that that helps you be more creative, but also gets over the limitation of AI, which is that it doesn't know everything about everyone?

Amber Ivey:

Listen to the challenge that Dr. Williams just gave you. Like, how can you actually make that AI better? The way we have it set up right now on our podcast, you and your parents can text us the answer, and feel free to leave an email there as well. Share some of those things on the show. So definitely don't mind doing that. I actually love that, Dr. Williams. Thank you for that. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_01:

I can't wait to find out what people come up with.

Amber Ivey:

Me too. Speaking of this idea of a challenge to kids, they may be asking, Dr. Williams, I don't know how to start. Like, how do I start learning about AI so that I can answer the question for your challenge? What do you tell them to do next?

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, okay. There are many ways that I get started with new challenges. One, I talk to people who I think know something about it. So if you're going after the challenge that I talked about, maybe there's a teacher you can ask. If you just want to learn more about AI in general, do you know anyone in your life who knows a lot about AI? Or are there other podcast episodes that you can listen to so that you can learn more and then have a bunch of questions and then work through some of those questions with people that you do know? Those are two things that I would recommend because there's a lot out there about AI. I also sometimes just try things and play around and get it wrong a whole lot. So if you were to try the AI playground, the scratch block thing, um, we have a couple of like tutorials that can get you started, but maybe just try something. Maybe say, I really just want a robot that can say hello in my name, and I will figure that out. And once I figure that out, we'll move to the next challenge. The last thing I would recommend is create something, ideally with other people, but create something that you think is missing. So, for example, you go and read a book like Unmasking AI, and you're like, Well, this is great, but I don't think anyone in my class would read this book. It needs to be simpler, it needs to talk about AI that we have today. Well, I think that's a challenge for you to go and create that thing. So that's kind of a mixture of advice and some possible next steps. There's a lot more where you can go learn, where you can try things, where you can try and create new things, and that sort of gets you on your way to learning more about AI and technology.

Amber Ivey:

I love that because I think kids are at the place where they haven't lost that creativity, and sometimes as you get older, you use it. So I feel like they're well positioned to take those challenges and actually go after them. And I'm really excited to see what comes in to our text messages. So, kids, make sure you work with your parents to look in the show notes, and you'll be able to text us directly on your answers. I want to do another segment to learn more about you. It's called Two Truths and a Dream. Okay. You'll tell us two true facts about your life and one dream, job, or experience you had as a kid. We'll guess, as well as the kids at home, which one is the dream? Are you ready?

SPEAKER_01:

I'm ready.

Amber Ivey:

Are you ready? Okay, go for it. All right, I'm gonna try to guess. Kiss as usual. I'm gonna use context clues and try to walk through this out loud, and you should be doing the same thing.

SPEAKER_01:

All right, let's begin. One of the ways that I love thinking about robots is by doing robots that dance because I'm a dancer. I've built more than 100 robots in my entire lifetime. And my favorite kinds of robots are robots that know how to fly. And the way that I learned that was by working on drones when I was at NASA.

Amber Ivey:

Hmm. These are hard. Okay, kids. I'm gonna say them back and just want to make sure I got them right, Dr. Williams. The first is you're really interested in robots that love to dance because you like to dance. Yes. The second one is you've built hundreds of robots in your lifetime, which is wild to me, but also it could happen. Is that the second one? Is that right? That's exactly yes, lots, lots of robots. And then the third one is that you love robots that learn to fly because you worked on drones while at NASA. So the first one surrounding the whole idea of you like dancing robots, but you like the dance, is I'm looking at her energy. She has a lot of energy, so she's really fun and exciting. So I imagine that that could be true, but I don't want to say it's true just yet, so I'm gonna put that aside. The second one around building a hundred robots, I also think that's true, but there may be something in there where you've built more or slightly less, so that may be a numbers thing. Kids, because remember, she talked about like all those robots, she worked with all those kids. It was a whole bunch of kids in that program. So that's one where I'm like, uh, that may be the dream in just like using the numbers in a different way. Could be wrong. Third is her favorite robots are flying robots because she worked on drones at NASA. I imagine that could also be true. So I'm struggling with this one because that could also be a technicality. And I'm wondering, I haven't looked into NASA in a very long time, so I don't know how much drone work they've done. Also, known some of their space stuff was kind of like not working as much. So I imagine they would have to do things like drones or other things or use drones. Okay, kids, I know I'm like going around on this. Hopefully, you have an answer. I'm gonna stick to my original thought, and I'm gonna say the dream is hundreds of robots.

SPEAKER_01:

You are incorrect. I have built my hundred robots.

Amber Ivey:

Do you have a second? Okay, walk us through, like, tell us about the experience of each of one and let me know which one's the dream.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, so starting with the first one. I actually have not built robots that can dance yet. Yeah. And I was trying to be tricky. So I built robots that can draw.

Amber Ivey:

Ah, okay.

SPEAKER_01:

Um, and that's like on its way to dancing. I was trying to make a robot that could dance pachata with me.

Amber Ivey:

Oh, that's so cool. It didn't work. But you do like to dance, I imagine.

SPEAKER_01:

I do like to dance. I do like to dance. Okay, I got that right.

Amber Ivey:

The vibe was here.

SPEAKER_01:

I built more than 100 robots for the first day of AI because I thought it was a really good idea to hand build 100 robots to really inspire some kids to learn about AI. I did not do that again. Now you can buy the robots offline. Shout out to the most amazing Europe's for helping me do that. It was like 10 of us all night. It was a task. Yeah, teamwork. And the robots that can fly. But actually, I did not work on a single space robot. I only worked on drones while I was at NASA.

Amber Ivey:

That is so cool. I love your career. I love the work that you've done. And it's just so cool to talk to you about this. Before we head out, do you have any advice for kids who want to use technology to help their communities or just any advice in general that you want to make sure you leave behind?

SPEAKER_01:

If you would love to use your amazing skills to help your community, then I would highly recommend you learn a new skill and teach it to someone else. Because it turns out that you really, really know something when you can teach someone else, even better if you can teach it to a preschooler. I think that that has helped me a lot because when I teach other people things and they ask questions that I don't have answers to, and so I get to learn more and I get to go off the excitement that they have. So I guess what I'm saying is if you want to learn something, find someone who you want to teach that thing to, maybe a parent that's sitting nearby you and wants to learn about AI with you or from you. Maybe you go and teach a class about it. I think that your teacher would really appreciate that. Maybe you go and teach a friend. There's so many people who I think could benefit. One of my favorite projects, I built an AI storybook and then I tried to make a version of it with my dad. It medium results, y'all. But it was a big learning experience for both of us. Yeah, that's my recommendation. Learn something, teach someone else, pass it on. I believe that National Coding Week is coming up, so go and get your opportunity to learn how to program. That's where I started, and never let anyone tell you you can't have both technology and art. You can have both, and it's a lot of fun.

Amber Ivey:

That is the perfect way to end today. You can have both. I truly appreciated that. Thank you so much for joining us today, Dr. William. And thank you to all the listeners for tuning in again. Don't forget to subscribe to AI for Kids. Stay curious and do that challenge that she mentioned earlier. Thank you for joining us as we explore the fascinating world of artificial intelligence. Don't keep this adventure to yourself. Download it, share it with your friends, and let everyone else in on the fun. Subscribe wherever you get your podcast or on YouTube. See you next time on AI for Kids.

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Amber Ivey (AI)

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