By Sam Riley

The Senior Capstone courses offered at Collegiate give seniors the ability to pursue more focused interests during their final year in the Upper School. These capstones include courses such as TEDxYyouthRVA; International Emerging Leaders (IEL) Captones focused on China, the Americas and our own international conference; and River City, which focuses on Richmond. These semester-long courses give seniors opportunities to extend their reach into the greater community and even around the globe. This year an experimental new course was added called Technohumanism. 

Technohumanism is a course about the combination of mind and machine, focused on artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) technology and the ethics of both. The class, created and taught by Upper School art and design teacher Jere Williams and Upper and Middle School STEAM Coordinator Daniel Bartels, piqued my interest. Williams, my old baseball coach, is a great person to start an interesting conversation with about any art or philosophical topic. In addition, Bartels leads Collegiate’s robotics and STEAM programs.

Bartels said that the idea for the class originated when  “[former Upper School Academic Services Director Dr. Todd] Hanneman and Mr. Williams and I were just talking about the intersection of mutual interest.” The original name of the class that the three came up with was Technohumanism: Mind, Brain, and Machine. Williams took charge of the mental aspect, focusing on the philosophy and ethics of the technology we were discussing. Hanneman was interested in the brain aspect of the class, because of his neuroscience background, but he left Collegiate to work at the International School of Amsterdam in the Netherlands at the end of last school year. Bartels focused on the curriculum in the course that involved computers or anything technical. This being a first-year Capstone class, there really was no framework for Williams and Bartels to base their ideas on. Collegiate allows teachers some freedom to develop their own classes, and these two creative thinkers crafted a really interesting and compelling class. 

The class started off the fall 2019 semester with learning about AI. Williams posed interesting philosophical questions about the nature and possible problems of AI, while Bartels had us working on some very simple coding with LEGO robots. When we were studying AI, we started to look at one of the most advanced systems out there, AlphaGo. This program plays the ancient and notoriously complex game of Go. We got the opportunity to watch a great documentary, AlphaGo, about the creation of this AI and its Go matches against the former best player in the world, Lee Sedol. We ended up getting Go boards for the school and playing against Go AI in class. 

This is a great example of the advantages of having such a freeform class structure, meaning that sometimes deviating from the planned material became an opportunity to learn. Bartels and Williams later told us that this whole Go lesson wasn’t supposed to be a part of the class, but we ended up learning so much more about what we were studying than if we had just been lectured to. 

The next part of the class was dominated by time in the robotics lab, working on our final project. This final project was all about working in VR. We met with Lower School teachers in the 4th and Junior Kindergarten classes and discussed things we could make for the kids. The JK kids had just started reading fairy tales, and, as part of the JK group we created the fairy tales in VR. The main fairy tale my group and I worked on was Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The environments we created over a few weeks were amazing to watch grow, and being able to put ourselves and the JK students in the environment we created was a great end to the course. As my classmate, Shreya Sharma put it, “Making the VR project was definitely my favorite part of the class, and seeing the JK students’ smiling faces enjoying what we made was a great way to end the course.”

The main focus of this part of the class was to get us comfortable using the software Unreal Engine. Unreal Engine is used to make many videos, movies, and TV shows, like the new Lion King and The Mandolorian. Although it was difficult to learn without any coding experience, we eventually got comfortable enough with the program and created some fairy tail settings to put the JK students in.

Seeing this class evolve over the years will be very interesting. As Bartels said, “I look at the class the same way I look at the robot. [In the] the zero’th iteration, all you’re doing is looking at what’s wrong with it and how to improve it.” Bartels knows that “the class is going to evolve” and grow better with time. Not only will the class become stronger, but the students will as well. As students come up through the Lower and Middle Schools, more and more of them will learn about computers, robotics, coding, AI, and VR.

Featured image courtesy of floormag.net.