Oyster River High School (ORHS) sophomore Diyashree “Diya” Sridharan is giving back again to her former elementary school in a big way. Building on her fall 2023 experience offering a robotics club to fourth grade students, she launched Tiny Coders, a new series of seven after-school workshops designed to introduce Moharimet School fourth grade students to the fundamentals of artificial intelligence (AI) and critical thinking.
A former Moharimet student herself, Diya joined the Oyster River robotics program in sixth grade, sparking a passion that led her to join the high school robotics team. Now she's designing a progressive curriculum for younger students: third and fourth graders start with conditional programming and robotics, while fourth graders exclusively explore AI concepts.
"With the rise of AI in our world, I felt it was important to teach our youth how it works," Diya explained. "AI is not always right. Students already interact with the technology, and I feel it’s important for them to develop critical thinking skills."
In October and November, sixteen eager Moharimet fourth grade students gathered weekly in a classroom, enjoying snacks and an ambitious goal: exploring how AI can help combat real-world problems. During these sessions, students engaged with real AI models, such as Google Research, allowing them to experience real-world scenarios.
On November 3, for instance, students stepped into the shoes of engineers and data scientists who developed Google’s flood prediction tools that now send warnings to smartphones. Diya guided students to make choices about which data to use to build the model and demonstrated how these choices directly affected the activity’s outcomes. As she explained to students, human judgment remains essential, and not all data is equally useful.
Diya's path to teaching AI began last summer when she was accepted into a Harvard program on AI development and large language models, where she coded her own AI. When the program ended, she identified the basic skills a general person needs to understand AI and began curating resources to teach a course to younger students.
"I was fortunate to have very supportive parents who supported my dreams, and school should be that place for students," Diya said. "This year, I’m particularly proud that our group is approaching gender parity. I want to make sure every kid has an opportunity to pursue their interests. Tiny Coders can elevate all students and hopefully inspire them to go into STEM."
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Sixteen eager Moharimet students gathered weekly to learn about AI.
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Diya's Tiny Coders curriculum was inspired by her experience attending an AI development and large language models program at Harvard.