Screenshots taken by Aly Windsor (ZDNET).
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Important points of ZDNET
- Google's first AI quest is available for children aged 11-14.
- Each quest is based on actual Google AI research.
- High-tech companies are competing to sell AI to students.
Google has launched a new initiative to teach young students about some of the practical, real-world uses of AI. In the process, we have normalized the next generation of technology.
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AI Quests is a series of interactive online games that educate students ages 11 to 14 about how Google applies it to climate, health and other scientific challenges. The company launched the series on Tuesday.
“It's our latest initiative on AI literacy in the classroom, teaching the next generation not only to use technology, but to inspire AI to use it to positively impact your world,” Google wrote in a press release. This initiative was developed in collaboration with Google Research. Stanford Accelerator for Learning.
Each quest is set in a fantasy realm, and students can receive guidance from a virtual mentor named Dr. Sky. In the first quest, I modeled after Google's. Flood forecast In the research project, students are challenging to track variables such as rainfall and river flow, train AI models, and help in-game characters make more accurate flood predictions.
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According to Google, two more quests will focus on detecting eye diseases, with the latter being released in the coming months, based on Google's brain mapping research.
You can try the AI quest yourself here.
Getting young audiences accustomed to AI
“Move fast and break things” has long been the Silicon Valley governing motto. Now, another informal belief appears to be emerging: “Teach.”
They are increasingly focusing on students as large AI developers compete to exert their tools as extensively as possible. That's not a new tactic. The tech industry (like many others) is always targeting younger audiences, and marketers tend to see them as the forefront of changing cultural trends and more fundamentally embrace new products than older generations.
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However, this approach has been devoted to the rise of AI, depicting it as a future operating system by high-tech developers. In some corners, this rhetoric takes on existential overtones, with tech leaders warning that US and Chinese AI companies like Deepshek are trapped in the race to build technologies that determine the future geopolitical order.
This encourages fierce competition among AI developers and attracts the loyalty of a young audience. Google's new AI quest efforts are a perfect example. By gaming AI, the company aims to transform technology from an abstract concept into a practical and habitual part of student life.
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Last month, Google announced that it would be able to provide free access to AI Pro plans for university students from five countries. Confusing, grammatical, humanitarian, and similar recent efforts from Openai aim to help students use their products and build habits that can last for a long time in the future.
