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Welcome to the Friday edition of our newsletter. We spend Friday’s going deeper into tools and trends related to generative AI (and Tuesdays sharing news updates).

For this edition of our Friday newsletter, we're going to do something a little different. As spring break approaches, I (Porter) decided to mix things up with students in my course Artificial Intelligence Practicum, which I’m teaching at Drake University this semester.

The class serves as a senior capstone, where students work in groups to synthesize what they have learned in their AI coursework to complete an advanced project. For the first half of the semester, the students have been working diligently on their projects. As a break from the work they’ve been doing, yesterday we took a field trip to the Science Center of Iowa (SCI) to view its traveling exhibit “Artificial Intelligence – Your Mind & The Machine.”

Read below to hear a few lessons we learned, particularly if you’re a local parent looking for a way to keep your kid(s) occupied over the upcoming break.

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How do you make the complex ideas behind AI and its wide range of applications understandable to non-specialists, including children and their caregivers and teachers who pass through SCI’s doors every day? With generative AI, it’s never been easier. Case in point, the exhibit had an AI image generation feature, a display of AI generated videos, and a station where computer vision was used to translate Spanish text into English text in real time. Along side digital displays, there were some analog features as well, like a physical decision tree one could manipulate to identify a given striped animal, spot-the-difference puzzles illustrating anomaly detection, and a display that illustrated ambiguity associated with natural language.

When you live inside of a bubble of constant AI news and developments like we do, it’s always helpful to get a reminder of what the world of AI looks like to the uninitiated. What’s daunting is that many of us don’t even know what we don’t know. That’s why exhibits like the one hosted by SCI are so helpful to foster AI literacy, providing a foothold to folks who recognize that AI is changing the world around them without understanding how or why.

What’s also staggering to me is that, unlike many of the other features in SCI, ones that illustrate well-established principles in areas like structural engineering, astronomy, biology, agriculture, and physics that stand the test of time, any exhibit covering current trends in AI has a fairly short shelf life. Kudos to SCI for hosting an exhibit that provided balanced coverage of concepts from classical AI, the historical development of AI, and AI in popular culture alongside more contemporary topics like large language models, self-driving cars, and facial recognition algorithms.

I particularly enjoyed watching my students, many of whom have spent nearly four years learning about AI from the perspectives of computer science, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, literature, design, law, and business, interact with the exhibit not just as future technologists, but as broader experts in the field. I came to realize that for each of them, of the many ideas explained and illustrated throughout the exhibit, none of them were new. In a sense, the visit served as a physical reminder of just how far they’ve come. The world of AI has a steep learning curve, and many of these students have navigated that learning curve well. And yet, unsurprisingly, they still know how to have fun!

There’s clearly a lot to learn at “Artificial Intelligence – Your Mind & The Machine,” and my students and I had fun exploring the exhibit together.

I am deeply grateful to the folks at the Science Center of Iowa for not only providing the opportunity for me and my students to visit the exhibit, but also for engaging the public to help foster AI literacy. Special thanks to VP of Science Learning Rob Burnett for agreeing to host us and Director of STEM Innovation Jolie Pelds for connecting on site.

If you’re interested in seeing the exhibit for yourself, or if you need an activity to break up the spring break doldrums, head on down to downtown Des Moines and take a look. The exhibit will be hosted by SCI through April 2026.