From Monday, August 21, to Saturday, August 26, Keio University's AI and Advanced Programming Consortium (AIC) organized an event called AIC Week, which was held at Yagami Campus for students from affiliated schools. AIC is a learning community where students come together from all years and faculties, from the sciences to the humanities, to acquire knowledge and expertise in AI.
AIC Week was an initiative first proposed by Keio's affiliated schools and organized from the ground up by university student members. The event aimed to familiarize elementary, junior high, and high school students with programming and data science. Participating students in the “Bottle Flip Challenge” program for upper elementary school students on August 25 presented the aggregated results in groups. During the program, students came up with hypotheses based on the shapes and contents of the bottles, discussed, and conducted experiments in the gymnasium. AIC university students engaged these groups to provide support for the experiments and other activities, but the elementary school students were left to discuss among themselves to come up with their hypotheses and presentations. At the end of the event, the university student members used relatable examples to explain data science and encouraged the participating students to find new applications of the principles they had learned.
AIC Week, which aims to cater to a broad age group from elementary school students to high school students, became an avenue for the managing team of university students to practice, through much trial and error, the Keio philosophy of "learning while teaching, teaching while learning." "Programming sounds kind of interesting!", "I have always liked programming!", "I want to learn more about programming!" — these are some of the motivations behind the children who gathered at Yagami Campus this summer and used their interests to drive the learning process.