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This year, Mercersburg Academy has introduced a new senior capstone class, AI Innovation Lab, giving seniors a chance to explore artificial intelligence across the year. Jessica Dobrin, the facilitating faculty member for the class, said, “We are working with an outside company that runs this type of course at schools all over the country. In future years, we hope to bring it within Mercersburg.” The class runs on Zoom with an instructor from Inspirit AI, located in Washington D.C., teaching the class. The class doesn’t require students to have any fundamental knowledge of computer science. “It’s definitely something that’s open to everybody.” Dobrin said, “People who have a background in coding will have a bit of an advantage, but the course is designed so that people with an interest can come in regardless of their experience.” 

 Dobrin noted that the course was initially proposed by former Associate Head of School for School Life Julia Maurer when she realized AI’s growing prevalence in everyday life. Dobrin said that AI has the capacity to create and replace jobs; therefore, arming Mercersburg students with a basic understanding of the rising technological advancements will prepare them for the new future. 

Several students taking the course noted AI’s increasing role in all aspects of human existence. “AI is definitely the future. You can see how much it’s developing, so it’s important to get an education on it,” said Finn Mauro ’27. 

The class uses AI with other tools like Python to code. Students work with various AI models like ChatGPT and Google Gemini as well as Google Colab, a platform used for writing code. Preston Zhang ’27 said, “We developed a game with AI. It's so versatile. All the coding I’ve done before is hard coding, but just telling the AI to make something and telling it to build a game or telling it to build a website is so much easier than actually doing all the code.” Instead of simply learning how AI tools like ChatGPT work, Dobrin said, “It’s less about learning responsible use and more learning about how those machines work from the back end so that they have a better grasp of the things that they can do with them and learn to kind of extend it beyond basic tasks.”

Though the students in the class haven’t yet  worked on many projects, they have learned how AI is being used in different fields. Eric Cabezas ’27 reported experimenting with Spotify data sets and using AI to make graphs based on energy versus tempo to determine if songs deemed as happy are actually happy songs. Mauro said, “We haven’t worked on a lot of projects, but one thing we did was vibe coding. I created a minesweeper adaptation with power-ups, and it operated really well.” 

AI Innovation Lab has challenged students in different ways; for Mauro, learning to code was the hardest part, while Zhang found it challenging to figure out his position within the up-and-coming field. AI Innovation Lab has also provided a challenge for Dobrin. “AI is such a rapidly evolving technology that I’m having to learn a lot of this alongside them or maybe even a day or two ahead of them,” she said. 

By the end of the course, the students hope to be able to do a variety of different things with AI. For some, AI will be a useful tool. Cabezas said, “I hope to just have it help me code in general.” Zhang hopes to deepen his understanding of AI: “I want to be able to understand AI as well as test and play with its parameters. Others, like Mauro, simply hope to be better prepared for the future: "I want to be more familiar with it and better equipped to handle it in the real world.”