FAIRFAX COUNTY, Va. (7News) — Students at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology are learning Artificial Intelligence, also known as AI.

While many fret about the negative impacts AI may have on K-12 education, hundreds of students are building tools to solve problems that will help education.

Malcolm Eckel, a Computer Science teacher said his students are excited about learning about artificial intelligence.

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“We are trying to push our students to understand where AI is at today then we have to be at today,” said Eckel.

Eckel is at the forefront of writing the entire computer science curriculum he said from scratch.

“The last unit of our class we make sure that they are introduced to the very most cutting edge tools and it’s a pretty regular occurrence that between the beginning of the school year and the end, the stuff that we need to teach them at the end changes. We are constantly updating this curriculum,” said Eckel.

Eckel calls it a necessary challenge and said they are starting the first big project that he considers AI.

“The students need to write code that can solve 100 sudoku puzzles in one second,” said Eckel. “The last assignment students write is code that can read handwriting.”

Eckel is excited to get the conversation started about what AI means for the world and future jobs.

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President Joe Biden signed an executive order on artificial intelligence just this week.

“There is a huge amount in there so they are going to put a tremendous amount of resources into AI and if someone wanted to get into AI –– now is the time,” said Peter Gabor, a Computer Science teacher.

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