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Welcome to the AI Racing League

Promoting equity and innovation in AI education.

Event Journey Map

The AI Racing League is a fun way to learn the concepts behind artificial intelligence! We learn AI by teaching small remote-controlled (RC) cars to drive around a track autonomously. The cars use a low-cost Raspberry Pi computer (or NVIDIA Nano) with a camera. Students drive around the track and gather a set of images to "train" a neural network that can be used to automatically steer the car.

In addition to teaching machine learning, this course also teaches concepts like Python programming, computer vision, data science and generative AI. Our curriculum is inspired by the DonkeyCar and the CoderDojo mentoring system. We feature a wide variety of lesson plans for the 5th-grade up to college-level participants.

Our secret sauce is to combine the right hardware, software, mentors and a flexible learning curriculum to create fun events that students love to participate in.

Notice

We are terminating our support for the NVIDIA Nano. This is driven by the fact that the Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB is selling at $75 and the Nano 4GB is now $150. There are considerable problems with the end-of-life of the NVIDIA support for the JetPack libraries.

Current Status

We have several new events happening in 2024. Please contact Dan McCreary if you would like to participate.

The following organizations have expressed an interest in helping out:

  1. Code Savvy - Contact: Valarie Lockhart - The AI Racing League runs as a project under Code Savvy. They are a 503C not-for-profit organization.
  2. Minneanalytics - Contact: Dan Atkins - contact Dan Atkins directly if you are looking for funding for your team.
  3. Washburn High School - Contact: Peter Grul
  4. Best Buy Education - Contact: Wes Strait - Wes and his team have run several events using the Amazon deep racer.
  5. Minnesota STEM Partnership - Contact: Michael Wulf - Michael created his first AI Racing League team in the summer of 2021.
  6. Create Minneapolis Contacts: Krista Stommes and Rob

Mission

The mission of the AI Racing League is to create and deliver educational materials that will make fun AI training accessible to everyone. We place a special focus on students from disadvantaged communities including women and minorities. We work as a sub-project of the CodeSavvy not-for-profit organization and we adhere to their guidelines for the quality and security of our students. This means that all our volunteers have background checks and we limit the student-to-mentor ratios to no more than three students per mentor. We are committed to equal-opportunity mentoring. We strive to recruit, train and retain the best mentors we can find.

We are inspired by the values behind the CoderDojo mentoring system and their innovative use of flexible concept cards. We attempt to publish concept cards that provide a flexible and agile training environment for a wide variety of learners.

We believe strongly in student-led initiatives and project-based learning. We feel students learn the most when they are building things together in teams. We believe our curriculum should be broad to support a wide variety of students from beginning Python to advanced AI.

Rather than force students down a single path of learning, we believe our instructors should be more like travel guides to help students explore their areas of interest. Our curriculum needs to adapt to single-hour events up to multi-year mentoring. See Rhizomatic Learning for what inspires us.

Checkout Our Other Sites:

Other Resources

  • Education Material: If you would like to teach AI Racing in the classroom, at a meetup or even in a corporation check out our resources here
  • Resources: Want to connect or contribute to the community check us out here