AI Education To Get More Accessible In Bay Area

In some ways, Sunnyvale resident and high school junior Kaashvi Mittal could not escape the world of computers and software growing up; after all, she was born and raised in the heart of Silicon Valley and both her parents had tech careers. Fortunately for her, she enjoyed every bit of it.

Apart from fostering a budding interest in programming, at a very young age Mittal also picked up on the gender disparity in this field, a realization that spurred her towards absorbing herself even more in this space. Mittal was already a member of her school’s Girls Who Code club, and the Intersectional Feminist Student Association when the term artificial intelligence started appearing everywhere in the wake of one of its most groundbreaking applications: ChatGPT. Unsurprisingly, Mittal was curious. 

“I had this amazing opportunity to learn about artificial intelligence by participating in this program called Stanford AI4All,” she said of her initial introduction to AI’s basic principles. “Later, while I was talking to my friends, I realized that many people viewed the topic of AI as a very inaccessible topic – they thought it was too complex for them to understand.”

Identifying a gap in education about AI, and recognizing that this gap might be more pronounced among young girls, Mittal decided to share her knowledge with them. She planned a series of four workshops for middle-school students in the summer of 2024, as part of an initiative called Proud Girl. The weekly workshops were virtual, which meant that interested students from the Bay Area as well as India could join in. The workshops were a success, and she sensed there was demand for more – and not just from young girls. 

“I realized that it would be so much more powerful to create an organization that was more centered around bringing AI to everyone, no matter their background, no matter their gender, no matter their age,” she said. “That’s why I decided to rebrand the organization to be called Together We AI, to make it more focused on the mission of expanding accessibility of AI education to everyone.”

In the fall, Mittal conducted four additional in-person workshops hosting ten to twenty students each at public libraries in San Jose and Sunnyvale.

“Initially I was the one who reached out to them [the libraries], but as the topic of AI has become more prominent, libraries have also been reaching out to me now,” she said. “They are also interested in meeting the demand for learning about AI in the community.” 

For 2025, Mittal has planned ten more workshops in the Spring in association with Silicon Valley Reads, a community engagement initiative that provides public events to Bay Area residents. While she is focusing on middle-school students, Mittal would like to expand her offerings to elementary school students, adults, and even seniors. She also wants to explore the possibility of workshops on specific AI applications, machine learning, and basic coding.

Mittal’s teaching philosophy is to avoid complicated jargon and abbreviations that intimidate students. Instead, she relies on analogies from everyday life to explain AI’s core principles. For instance, she uses the tea-making process to illustrate the difference between a standard computer program and an AI system:  

“Imagine there’s a cup of boiling water on the table behind you,” she explains. “A regular software system is programmed to boil water from scratch, so it would take out the pot and start boiling water again. But an AI system is trying to make the most logical decision in order to accomplish the goal of making tea. So it would use the cup that has boiling water already inside of it, just like humans would, as it has more information from its surroundings to learn from.”

Her endeavor of expanding AI education to all has not detracted from her focus on her own education – she is still an active part of her school clubs and is helping her school’s faculty develop curriculum about the use of AI in biology in her capacity as a Teaching Assistant. 

Her ambition is to make a career for herself at the cutting edge of computer science, artificial intelligence, or an allied field; but Mittal intends to continue Together We AI even after she graduates from St. Francis High School in 2026. 

“I would love to scale the organization in terms of people, because right now, it’s just me,” she said. “The age of AI has just started, in terms of all of its capabilities that we’re seeing, and it’s just going to continue to be more prominent as time goes on. So I think that there’s still a need to bridge that gap in AI education accessibility, and I want to contribute through this initiative!”

(The article is published under a mutual content partnership arrangement between The Free Press Journal and India Currents).