Weekly Teen AI Builders Club: Advanced Projects

This club is for teens who already know Python and want to move past tutorials into building AI projects that actually work. Each 75-minute session works like a mini hackathon: a clear brief, a short technical deep dive, focused team build time and a demo at the end.

The club follows a four-week rotating cycle. Computer vision week uses transfer learning to build an image classifier on a custom dataset. Language week explores how large language models work and has teams build a small text tool with prompts, structured output and simple guardrails. Data science week drops teams into a real public dataset to clean data, engineer features and compare models. The cycle ends with Demo Day, where each team ships and presents a polished mini app and gives feedback on other teams' code.

Teams of two or three rotate roles each week, taking turns as lead coder, tester and presenter. This builds the teamwork and communication skills that matter on real engineering teams, along with the confidence to explain technical decisions out loud. The teacher reviews code live, points out better patterns and pushes each team with stretch goals.

Returning members tackle harder variations of each theme, so the club stays challenging month after month. Over time, learners build a portfolio of working notebooks and demos they can show in school applications or competitions.

How classes work

Sessions run in Google Colab notebooks shared by the teacher. Each class has a 15-minute concept deep dive, about 45 minutes of team build time in breakout rooms with teacher check-ins, and a 15-minute demo and code review.

What we'll cover

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  Week 1: Computer Vision Sprint – Build and evaluate an image classifier on a custom dataset using transfer learning.

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  Week 2: Language Models in Practice – Build a small text tool with prompts, structured output and simple guardrails.

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  Week 3: Data Science Challenge – Clean a real dataset, engineer features and compare models to find the best performer.

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  Week 4: Team Demo Day – Ship a polished mini AI app, present it and give structured code-review feedback.

Learners should be comfortable writing Python (functions, lists, dictionaries and loops) and have some exposure to basic machine learning ideas. A free Google account is needed for Colab.