Hour of AI 2025

How do you explain AI to an elementary student? At DEVCON Manila’s Hour of AI, I volunteered as a facilitator to help kids answer that for themselves.

We skipped the math and code and started with something every kid knows: cats and dogs. What makes a cat a cat? Pointy ears, whiskers, the shape of its face. Once the kids started listing features, they were already thinking like a machine learning model, which learns to tell things apart by looking at the features they have in common.

Guiding them through those ideas reminded me that the core of AI can be explained simply. If a child can follow it, the explanation is a good one.