AI Fluency Starts Here: How Kent Place Is Preparing Students for a Digital World

Members of the Kent Place Class of 2025 are among the first to have received some form of artificial intelligence (AI) education under the Ethics Institute. As this group of seniors prepares to leave for college, we wanted to recap some of the opportunities they have had for AI learning and how we expect more opportunities to abound for other classes.

This past year, there have been various activities and events driven by the goal of increasing the general knowledge and fluency of AI usage throughout the Kent Place community. Here were some highlights. 

• AI Summit: The Ethics Institute’s REBOOT (Rethinking Ethical Behavior Online for Oneself Together) put together an AI summit as a chance for neighboring schools to connect over the topic of addressing AI education in high school. Attendees heard from Jia Michel, discussed various case studies, and created their own.
• Assemblies: The entire Upper School listened to alumna Alyssa Hwang, a computer science PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, give her insights into AI. Students also came together for a presentation by Kent Place parent Raj Bakhru, the cofounder of BlueFlame AI, about AI’s applications and current usages in the financial industry.
• Hackathon: In April, the Hackathon Committee — Skylar Li, Anna Bultó, and Alisha Gupta — hosted an AI-centered hackathon that attracted many Kent Place students as well as others from across the state. These participants spent the day working on projects that incorporated AI with the purpose of solving real-world problems in a variety of fields. They also heard from a panel of women with extensive AI experience, from companies such as OpenAI, Novartis, and Salesforce. 

Though these events have been a great start, it is crucial that the Ethics Institute and the school as a whole provide more opportunities for growth in AI fluency. The Class of 2025 has built a strong foundation of AI knowledge, but they need to build on it in order to thrive in their future professions. Various institutions of higher education have embraced this need by either incorporating AI education into their schools or creating classes and majors with that purpose. For example, the Icahn School of Medicine, at Mount Sinai in New York City, has been one of the first medical schools in the nation to integrate AI training directly into their curriculum. The University of Pennsylvania has become the first institution to offer an Artificial Intelligence Undergraduate Program, and numerous other universities have AI courses across various fields; both Villanova University and Wharton’s MBA program allow students to add a specialization in AI and machine learning. This demonstrates the growing influence of AI in all students’ lives and raises various questions about the role high schools should be playing in preparing them. 

Kent Place students will feel a smooth transition into these colleges, as they have had exposure to AI throughout their high school career. However, the presence of AI education is not guaranteed in all universities; this is especially apparent in the field of law. Currently, law schools are failing to embrace AI when it comes to their curriculum, which is challenging because legal research has been transformed by generative AI. According to the American Bar Association, “[T]he lack of AI-driven education in law schools makes undergraduates less competitive in this market.” Efficiency and technological proficiency are increasingly a crucial part of the practice of law; by neglecting the need for AI fluency, law schools are hindering their students’ futures. 

This contrasts with our high school AI education: Kent Place is setting up students for success by exposing them to technologies they are bound to use in the future.

The Ethics Class of 2025 and the Team at the Ethics Institute

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