Inside the AIFS AI Tech Camp: How High School Students Build with AI

EDITOR’S NOTE:

Sixty high school students. Two weeks. One question: what happens when you hand teenagers real machine learning tools and point them at the food and agriculture system?

This summer’s AIFS AI Tech Camp at UC Davis guided high school students from across California, taking them from their first Python scripts to trained models, robotics systems, and AI projects focused on agricultural applications.

Following the program, we asked the researcher-instructors Stephanie Nawas, Prabhash Ragbir, and Zhian Li to reflect on their teaching weeks. Their responses have been lightly edited and woven together for clarity and length.

Q: What Did Students Build at the AIFS AI Tech Camp?

Prabhash: The most memorable final presentation was the team that built an animal detection model. They did a live demonstration using their laptop camera and animal pictures on a phone. It was actually very impressive because their model detected a wide range of animals with very good accuracy.

Zhian: Team Growers stood out for me because of how well they connected many of the concepts we covered throughout the week—including sensors, actuators, plant detection, machine learning, and automated decision-making—into one coherent system.

Q: What Surprised the Instructors Most?

Prabhash: One funny moment was when a student proudly announced, “Our model got an accuracy of 95%, which was the highest accuracy among all the teams!” We love that he took the opportunity to brag a bit.

Stephanie: One student mentioned how fascinated she was by the concept of the “black box” of neural networks.

Zhian: One group reached out to me because they wanted to build an app from scratch to monitor plant health using light sensor data and photosynthetic rate information. I was impressed because they were already thinking beyond the workshop activity and trying to build something with real-world applications.

Q: Why Are California High Schoolers Learning AI for Agriculture?

Zhian: One student shared that they hope to become a biological engineer and continue exploring the intersection of agriculture and AI. It was encouraging to see students connecting biology, engineering, and technology with real-world agricultural challenges.

Q: What Will the Instructors Remember?

Stephanie: Multiple students came up to us at the end and shared that they had a fun time and learned a lot. Some even invited us to speak or mentor at their high schools.

A camp that opened with a Python tutorial closed with students asking us to come speak at their schools. That is a better outcome than anything on the lesson plan.

Q: How Do You Apply to the Next AIFS AI Tech Camp?

Applications for the AIFS AI Tech Camp are open to high school students at every experience level every summer. Subscribe to the AIFS newsletter for camp announcements, application deadlines, and news about other exciting research projects happening at AIFS.