Artificial Intelligence

AI has been progressing at a rapid pace, and it’s clear that it will have a large impact on the tech space as a whole, as well as Computer Science. It is clear that anyone who works in the technology space will need to understand these tools and be able to adapt as they change. Students who take our classes will be provided with practical and theoretical experiences to help them understand this new technology stack.

We have a clear mandate not only to teach about current approaches to modern technology use, but also to adapt and be flexible as things change in the future. During a student’s time in our program, they will start by learning basic coding, but they will also have AI topics integrated into their experience, and those experiences will expand as the student progresses through the program.

In our intro class, students will learn about and program their own perceptron. As appropriate, these integrated experiences will continue to expand in complexity as students learn about training AI agents, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), computer vision, large language models (LLMs), and autonomous robotics. These topics will adapt as we start to see industry trends emerge.

The premier experience in the Academy is the DuckieBots from Duckietown. This small vehicle is powered by a Jetson Nano and is capable of handling all of the necessary AI compute onboard. This university-level engineering experience has been adapted for our students, and students will learn about how robots see the world and how to create their own self-driving vehicle. This experience is not about coding; it is about how to solve a problem, one that is novel for the students and requires some serious thought. It will also allow students to experience the full breadth of AI tools.