A Continuous 3rd-Year Presence at AI Exploration Day @ Hudson Middle School

AI Exploration Day at Hudson Middle School in Hudson, Ohio is an annual event designed to introduce students to the world of artificial intelligence and its real-world applications. For the third consecutive year, the ICICLE team showed up — and this year’s demos made it clearer than ever that the next generation of AI researchers might already be sitting in a middle school classroom.

What Did We Present as ICICLErs?

Our ICICLE team delivered a hands-on, engaging overview of AI for multiple groups of students. We started by asking: where does AI appear in your daily life? Both consciously (like using ChatGPT) and unconsciously (like Google search rankings). We introduced ICICLE’s mission and shared how it collaborates with projects like Imageomics to support environmental and animal ecology use cases.

We highlighted Jenna Kline’s work at The Wilds, where she uses drones to capture ecological data — arguably the crux of any machine learning process. The data she gathers helps ecologists analyze animal behavior for posture detection, unique animal identification, intrusion detection, and disease tracking.

We closed by discussing the challenges of applying general-purpose AI models to domain-specific problems like animal ecology, where data is limited and field conditions are highly variable.

How Did We “Ignite” Their Curiosity?

After the presentation, students rotated through two interactive demo stations:

1. Drone Flight Challenge

Students were given three rules: don’t crash it, don’t hurt yourself, and don’t hurt others. To our delight — they succeeded. No crashes, lots of laughter, and genuine curiosity about how drones are used in research.

2. Outsmart the YOLO Model

Students were challenged to find images that could confuse the YOLO object detection model. Using a Google Form, they uploaded images they believed would trip up the model.

The results were a mix of brilliance and hilarity. Some uploaded cartoon characters like Minions — which the model misidentified as generic “animals,” since YOLO is trained on the COCO dataset (which has no Minion category). Others uploaded hyper-realistic cakes or deceptive perspectives — like a man holding a camera disguised as food.

The insight that emerged organically: AI is only as good as the data it was trained on. Their experiments exposed gaps in pre-trained models and sparked real conversation about the importance of domain-specific fine-tuning — especially on resource-constrained devices like drones, smartphones, and camera traps.

Other Cool AI Demonstrations: Boston Dynamics’ Spot

Another standout demo was Spot, the Boston Dynamics robot dog, presented by the University of Akron. Spot’s advanced mobility, 360° perception, and gesture-based response system left students in awe. Commands like “sit,” “shake hands,” and “Saranghae ♡” made Spot feel like a futuristic pet.

But Spot isn’t just a fun demo — it’s a powerful research platform. With autonomous navigation and payload adaptability, it’s ideal for STEM outreach and real-world applications in human-robot interaction. Seeing its capabilities got us thinking: could robotic dogs like Spot be deployed in animal ecology or precision agriculture, patrolling fields and habitats with AI-powered sensors to detect crop disease, track animal behavior, or collect real-time environmental data?

The answer, increasingly, is yes. And these students just might be the ones to build it.