On a recent Saturday afternoon, the research fellowship’s 13 students gathered in the Wozniak Lounge in Berkeley’s engineering building to present their projects. A procession of teen girls, and one boy, approached a podium in the front of the room, wearing blazers and dresses, as their parents filmed them on their smartphones, and a photo collage of Steve Wozniak, an Apple founder, looked on. One girl was working on a tool to detect wildfires using a drone. Another had developed a speech bot that detected and responded to abusive language. One team of three had created a triage system for paramedics to respond to the most serious calls first; one team member explained that her grandmother had died after suffering a stroke last year when the ambulance took longer than 20 minutes to reach her. At the end, Russakovsky said, “I was coming here expecting we kind of played around with some data, and, no, these are, like, real research presentations!”

Speaking after the ceremony, the group on the paramedic project giggled that they’d just gotten their algorithm finally working the previous night. “I’m not going to lie, I was also surprised by the quality of our presentation,” said Viansa Schmulbach, a student from Portola Valley.* “We didn’t have working code at all; it was calling everything a diabetic emergency.” Their mentor, a female software engineer from IBM’s Watson group, sat down next to the team and handed them congratulatory laptop stickers.

Most of the students were Asian Americans from high-achieving Silicon Valley high schools with rigorous science and math curricula; a few told me their parents were doctors and engineers. Some said they’d been in computer-science camps and classes before AI4All, but that still didn’t mean they’d seen themselves going into the computer-science field. “The only person I knew who codes is my brother,” Trisha Sengupta, a student from a San Jose public high school, told me. Until recently, she’d thought she’d probably go into medicine. Now, after the project, Sengupta is pondering a double major in biomedical science and computer science. “Now there’s like a repository on GitHub which has my name on it,” she told me. “Okay, that’s cool.”

Programs like AI4All are no doubt drawing dozens of girls, people of color, and low-income teens into a field they otherwise wouldn’t have considered—which, in combination with other coding-focused camps, such as Black Girls Code, may start to improve diversity. Still, privately-run coding camps are not as scalable or omnipresent as, say, getting a basic coding curriculum into all junior high and high schools: The tech industry isn’t missing women and minorities in the dozens, but the tens of thousands.

At the end of the ceremony, Li stood and asked for feedback from the mentors. In the spirit of programming, she is keen on rapidly iterating to improve the program. “I see high- school students today being a lot more overscheduled than I was when I was in high school,” said one Pandora data engineer, eliciting knowing laughs from the parents. “It was difficult to make progress when there’s so many other competing things going on.” The engineer wondered whether it would be better run as a hackathon, and one mom said she wished the program had taken place during the summer, with less going on. Another mentor chimed in that she liked the multi-week format of the program: Since the students on her team arrived with differing levels of AI knowledge, it gave her time to help get them all up to speed.

One student wasn’t there to chime in: Stephanie Tena. Her mentor had fallen absent as the weeks wore on, and she didn’t have enough help to complete the project. So she was glumly stuck in Salinas. Still, AI4All was working on transferring her to another mentor, and she would present her water project to the high-school girls at this year’s Stanford camp. She’ll already be a familiar face: On the AI4All web page Tena first landed on, her photo is now at the top

*This post originally misstated the region where Stephanie Tena is from.

* This post originally misnamed the student speaking about the paramedic project. We regret the error.

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