I am delighted to announce a new collaboration between the Raspberry Pi Foundation and a leading AI company, DeepMind, to inspire the next generation of AI leaders.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation’s mission is to enable young people to realise their full potential through the power of computing and digital technologies. Our vision is that every young person — whatever their background — should have the opportunity to learn how to create and solve problems with computers.

With the rapid advances in artificial intelligence — from machine learning and robotics, to computer vision and natural language processing — it’s increasingly important that young people understand how AI is affecting their lives now and the role that it can play in their future. 

Experience AI is a new collaboration between the Raspberry Pi Foundation and DeepMind that aims to help young people understand how AI works and how it is changing the world. We want to inspire young people about the careers in AI and help them understand how to access those opportunities, including through their subject choices. 

Experience AI 

More than anything, we want to make AI relevant and accessible to young people from all backgrounds, and to make sure that we engage young people from backgrounds that are underrepresented in AI careers. 

The collaboration has two strands: Inspire and Experiment. 

Inspire: To engage and inspire students about AI and its impact on the world, we are developing a set of free learning resources and materials including lesson plans, assembly packs, videos, and webinars, alongside training and support for educators. This will include an introduction to the technologies that enable AI; how AI models are trained; how to frame problems for AI to solve; the societal and ethical implications of AI; and career opportunities. All of this will be designed around real-world and relatable applications of AI, engaging a wide range of diverse interests and useful to teachers from different subjects.

Experiment: Building on the excitement generated through Inspire, we are also designing an AI challenge that will support young people to experiment with AI technologies and explore how these can be used to solve real-world problems. This will provide an opportunity for students to get hands-on with technology and data, along with support for educators. 

Our initial focus is learners aged 11 to 14 in the UK. We are working with teachers, students, and DeepMind engineers to ensure that the materials and learning experiences are engaging and accessible to all, and that they reflect the latest AI technologies and their application.

As with all of our work, we want to be research-led and the Raspberry Pi Foundation research team has been working over the past year to understand the latest research on what works in AI education.

Next steps 

Development of the learning materials is underway now, and we have released the full set of resources on experience-ai.org. We are currently piloting the challenge for release in September 2023.