Google Research has released “Polar Peaks,” the third installment in its AI Quests educational series designed to teach students ages 11 to 14 how artificial intelligence works and how to use it responsibly, the company announced October 26.
The new quest places students in the role of Google researchers working to map neurons in a brain to understand a character’s memory loss. Students complete tasks including data cleaning and model testing, learning that AI requires human oversight and critical thinking. The game is inspired by Google’s decade of connectomics research—the science of mapping neural networks in the brain—including the recent mapping of the complete fruit fly brain, which Google describes as the largest brain map by number of neurons to date.
The AI Quests series, created by Google Research and the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, has had more than 400,000 quests completed to date and is localized to 10 languages. The first two quests focused on flood forecasting and eye disease detection, based on Google Research’s Flood Forecasting initiative and diabetic retinopathy screening model.
Google is also releasing dedicated teacher training modules to help educators incorporate the quests into classroom curriculum and reinforce AI literacy concepts. The modules are launching within the Google AI Educator Series, with training for the first two quests accessible now and the Polar Peaks module planned for next month.