Praxis AI, Clemson, South Carolina: AI Teaching AI to High Schoolers

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Praxis AI is transforming virtual and hybrid learning through the magic of Artifical Intelligence.  Students grow together in a safe, virtual online environment leveraging the power of AI in four different ways:

1. AI generated content, prioritized by social interactions and machine learning
2. An AI-powered mentor named Pria who provides personalized instruction, assesses student progress, and provides feedback as needed. Pria provides advice on a range of topics including help with course content, coding advice, research assistance, career guidance, and personal development.
3. Experiential AI-powered Jupyter Notebook labs in fully functional VMs
4. Collaboration between learners Pria, and mentors in Discord

The Praxis “Foundations of AI” junior/senior high-school online course – featuring AI-expert Reed Bender – guides students through a cutting-edge collection of resources and labs to equip them with the skills and tools to understand both the mathematics underlying machine learning and the revolutionary Python applications to implement AI.

The course was launched in January 2023 at the Governor’s School of Science and Math (GSSM) in South Carolina, ranked in the top 10 of all high schools in the United States. One of the few advanced public residential high schools of its kind, GSSM creates uniquely challenging experiences for SC's top students within a culture that promotes high achievement. GSSM’s two-year residential high school program—as well as its virtual high school program, summer camps, and outreach programs.

The Praxis Learning Experience Platform is available to GSSM students 24x7x365 via any web browser and includes four learning paths, thirteen lessons, and over fifty hours of content. The learning paths have been organized into four fundamental elements (Water, Earth Air, Fire) that coordinate the stages of learning:

• Water – students gain the foundational understanding necessary to progress in AI development. Students learn statistics, linear algebra, and data science techniques that are universal tools in Machine Learning.
• Earth – applies interactive Python code in which students are taught how to perform linear and logistic regression, K-nearest neighbor classification, principal component analysis (PCA), and dimensionality reduction techniques such as autoencoding.
• Air – dedicated to the ideas underlying the more advanced AI systems today such as neural networks and large language models.
• Fire – students aggregate all this knowledge to perform time-series analyses and create advanced generative AI models.

In the final project, students build their own large language model using the skills and coding expertise they developed throughout the course. Following is a quote from the instructor, Reed Bender:

“Pria has completely flipped the way I teach artificial intelligence. There is no longer any need to quiz students on basic syntax or worry they won’t follow the language. It frees me up as an instructor to teach AI like an art, focusing the student’s attention on learning foundational principles and developing intuition about AI’s inner workings, without being so bogged down in the weeds. I see Pria as a personal assistant: I offer the creativity; she implements the rationality.”

Students who complete this AI course qualify for the Foundations of AI digital badge. Earners successfully demonstrate experiential skills in data science, statistical learning, clustering, neural networks, generative AI and practical AI applications.

Instructor and AI Engineer: Reed Bender, Reed Bender Consulting

Alfred DeGennaro, DBA, Faculty and Chair of Computer Science & Engineering, GSSM

Praxis LXP and Pria Architect: Hugo Lebegue, Praxis AI