USC team wins award
A team of five Upper St. Clair students recently won the Multimedia Excellence Award for Outstanding Visual Design at the inaugural World Artificial Intelligence Competition for Youth (WAICY 2018). The team was comprised of Luke An, a fifth-grader at Boyce Middle School; Sam An and Aaron Jiang, third-graders at Streams Elementary; Ava Liu, a fourth-grader at Streams; and Cynthia Shen, a third-grader from Baker Elementary. The event, sponsored by Carnegie Mellon University and the WholeRen Education LLC, was held on CMU’s campus. The week of workshops and final competition provided students with the opportunity to learn about artificial intelligence programming. Using WholeRen’s “AI-In-A-Box,” a toolkit developed with input from CMU alumni and faculty, each team designed and executed projects that answered a simple question: How can AI change our lives? One hundred thirty students between the ages of 4 and 18 from as far away as China, Sweden and England, competed in person on 30 teams. An additional 20 teams competed remotely from around the world. The Upper St. Clair team was one of five that was recognized for its performance in the competition.