Students showcasing their artificial intelligence creations are imagining, and shaping, a new world
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette-
Two school buses pulled up to 1 PPG Place, their bright yellow shells reflected in the iconic glass building Downtown.
Dozens of students filed out, stepping into the building’s atrium. They arrived at the global company’s headquarters to showcase their artificial intelligence-powered creations.
“We know all of you come from different backgrounds and different aspirations, want different things,” said Chris Watts, president and CEO of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Western Pennsylvania. “But, what the Boys and Girls Clubs wants — why our corporate partners from PPG are here, why we have folks like the mayor … here — It’s because they believe in you.
“We believe in your success, and want you to have access to opportunities that you may even know about.”
The event, held Friday, was the final showcase and award ceremony for the three-week Artificial Intelligence Pathways Initiative program, a collaboration between PPG and the Boys and Girls Clubs of Western Pennsylvania. About 80 students participated and attended this summer, the program’s eighth year.
Student projects posed questions and propositions including:
“Should high school teachers be forbidden from using AI to give feedback or grades on student work?”
“Data centers built for AI should pay a higher electricity rate than households in the same region.”
Amid the posters showcasing their group research, the students stood in front of laptops, playing and demonstrating the video games they had created entirely through AI prompts.
Pittsburgh Mayor Corey O’Connor took it all in, praising the two organizations for forecasting the learning and resources that students need in order to face the unprecedented future of an AI-native world.
“This is an important day for all of you because you are seeing what the future is all about,” O’Connor said. “The future is in AI. It’s in tech. It’s in robotics. It’s in all of these companies that you are seeing thriving in Downtown Pittsburgh.
“But for us, you are our future. We want you to be part of that future, and it wouldn’t happen without all of you stepping forward and doing this program and going to the Boys and Girls Club and getting access to what the future of not only Pittsburgh but the world is going to look like.”
Michael Guido and Sahana Patel, representatives from U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick’s office, were also in attendance, checking out games and chatting with students.
The showcase day included a fashion show and a trivia competition, and ended with an awards ceremony honoring students’ AI creations across music and video games, judged by PPG employees who volunteered.
Jessiah Pendleton, a rising ninth grader at Propel Montour High School in McKees Rocks, said she learned about the good and bad of AI use, and most importantly — not to trust everything AI spits out.
Make sure it cites its sources, she said.
“I really didn’t know about AI, and a lot of my peers around me knew what it was already,” Pendleton said. “A lot of them were already caught up. So the hardest part about it for me was, I was a little bit behind, and I didn’t really know a lot. So we [had] to adapt and talk to different people and hear about how they experienced AI, and then I experienced it.”
Pendleton has a path laid out for herself, starting as a teacher, then becoming a social worker and ending her career as a business owner of a party planning boutique.
She said she learned how AI could help her start up that future business, including making logos — just like the ones she and her peers designed using AI and then wore on their gray shirts. She said she was surprised to learn how useful AI is in the medical field.
Twin brothers Arhan and Arman Mahammad Abdul, and Sai Suriya Chandrian, rising freshmen and sophomore, respectively, at South Fayette High School, created games from scratch simply by prompting Google’s AI platform Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude model. They attend the Boys and Girls Clubhouse in Shadyside.
“I feel like [AI]’s gonna be important in the future because AI will start getting way better, and it’ll take over probably a lot of jobs,” Arman said.
This is an entry point to a world of possibilities that “whether we like it or not” will involve an AI-powered future, said Malesia Dunn, executive director of the PPG Foundation.
And these students will be the people and workforce solving the issues of the future world, she said.
“We’ve got great stories of some of these kids who, this whole program changed their thinking,” Dunn said. “It’s changed the way they have thought about what they want to go to school for, what they want to study in college, what they want to do after school.”
“For them, this is going to be a natural evolution and a natural part of working in their environment going forward — whether it’s working or playing or anything else, honestly — so having the opportunity to learn these concepts now are really important for their future and the future of the region.”
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