News from the Hill
Gamification at MIT
This week, four Upper School Class 11 students presented their projects from spring internships with Dr. Manolis Kellis of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With varied previous experience in coding, these four learned to read and manipulate different coding languages and to work within a generative pre-trained transformer (what you might know as ChatGPT) to vectorize data. Vectorizing data via a transformer allows one to sort data into a contextualized map—it’s what happens in your brain when you associate "apples" with either "fruit" or "Macintosh," depending on the context.
This work led them to the gamification of education—when elements of gameplay and learning are intertwined. Their projects included assessing the relationships between enrolling in certain AP Courses and landing a particular internship, designing a custom GPT to use within specific information, and efficiently writing comprehensive course exams.
“This work has taught me to begin with the solution and trace the steps backward to understand the problem-solving process,” says Chloe ’25. “I’m able to apply critical thinking skills outside the classroom."
Thank you to Dr. Manolis for working with our students, and we look forward to seeing what Dean, Isaac, Apollo, and Chloe do next as they continue their fellowships this summer!
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