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Table of Contents

AI 101 Workshop Overview

The goal of the workshop is to deliver the fundamentals of AI to the audience in less than an hour (usually around 45 minutes). The content in the AI 101 Workshop slide deck is designed to be consumed by a non-technical audience. You can find the slide deck below 👇

Teaching Philosophy

We designed this TAI2A Toolkit Guide and the corresponding workshop with a specific teaching philosophy in mind. This philosophy came about through our own iterations of delivering workshops and collecting feedback from teachers & students. You can reduce this teaching philosophy to three general rules:

Make it Interactive

Interaction will help keep students engaged. It allows for a conversation, which means that students are afforded time and space to present their thoughts just as much as they are listening to the ideas in the workshop. There is a reason we call the session a workshop and not a presentation – even though we present our content through slides, they are meant as a general guide and not a prescriptive route.

To make the workshop more interactive, you can:

  • Engage and assess students’ learning with questions.
  • Welcome any questions from the students themselves.
  • Encourage meaningful conversations between the students.

From our experience, it is more valuable to have engaging conversations within the workshop than to finish the content of the slideshow.

Make it Relevant

Workshops on technical topics can be hard to relate to. A talk about artificial intelligence can easily get lost in jargon if we don’t pull back and explain how this can be relevant to our lives today and will be relevant to our lives in the near future. Making the workshop relevant to the students’ lives can also help them better identify with and understand the underlying principles.

To make the workshop more relevant, you can:

  • Use examples that are pulled from the students’ lives and experiences.
  • Pull examples and knowledge from your own life and experience, which will make the workshop easier to present for you.
  • Tie back any abstract topics back to real-life examples that drive home the implications of these ideas.
Look for Continuous Improvements

We would never claim that this workshop is at the best level it will ever be. In fact, the version you are seeing has already gone through many iterations, and we expect it to go through many more. You can be a big part of driving these iterations so that we are constantly adapting the workshop to better serve our audience.

To make the workshop continuously improve, you can:

  • Watch out for parts that seem confusing, try other ways of running those parts of the workshop, and give us your feedback about the things you have tried that worked well and those that didn’t.
  • Collect feedback from the students. Leave time for a survey that can help you learn how you did, how the presentation went, and what students are left thinking about. Use our feedback survey so that we can standardize and aggregate information from all the workshops our community delivers.
  • Think about other ways we can achieve the goals of this Toolkit, and reach out to our team if you have any ideas.

Getting Started

There are three main steps to getting started with the workshop, and if you accomplish all of these, we guarantee you will be ready to present in front of your first set of students.

Take our Knowledge Self-Assessment

Our knowledge self-assessment is a tool you can use to determine how well you know the content you will be presenting. It will touch upon three main parts: the mechanics of AI, the ethics of AI, and the impact of AI.

This tool is entirely for your use – nobody will be checking how well you do, so take the quiz fairly and use it to judge whether you need to brush up on any topics related to AI. Being confident in your own knowledge of AI will allow you to be more flexible and honest during the workshop and better answer any questions that students might have.

Watch an Example AI 101 Workshop

The example workshop is your chance to virtually sit-in on one of our workshops and see how we deliver it. This example is a workshop we delivered as a webinar in partnership with Mark Cuban Foundation; some things in the webinar are different, but a lot of the content is the same. The example is meant to be descriptive, not prescriptive – you do not have to present it in exactly the same way we do, but you are more than welcome to use any methods we have. It will be a useful tool for you to get a better understanding of what your workshop might look like.

To make best use of the example workshop, we recommend that you:

  • First, watch it once all the way through,
  • Watch it a second time and take notes about the content, and
  • Watch it a third time and take notes about the presentation style.
    • What did the presenter do that worked well?
    • How could you use your own voice to make it better?

Watching the workshop multiple times will also help you get more familiar with the content and how it flows, which will make it easier for you when you are running your own workshop.

Practice Delivering the Workshop

You can download the AI 101 Workshop slides from here: AI 101 Slide Deck. Note that every slide has a suggested script in the slide notes that can help guide you through delivering the content.

Walk through the slides as though you are presenting them. One useful way to practice is to find a few friends that will give you honest feedback, and present the slides to them as though they are students in a classroom. This will help you get comfortable talking about AI in front of others.

Make sure you practice, practice, practice! The more you know the content, the more relaxed you will be when you give your first workshop. If you need some resources to learn how to give effective workshops, here is a resource we recommend: Tips and Techniques for More Confident and Compelling Presentations.

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