SAIL's outreach began with a simple idea: meet students where they already gather. At the Boys & Girls Club, our volunteers set up around the tables and started a conversation about artificial intelligence — no jargon, no pressure, just questions.
This was our first session, and we had planned it as a presentation. That lasted about five minutes. The students had more to say than we expected, so we abandoned the slides and moved to the tables, and the session became a set of small-group conversations instead. Nearly every workshop we have run since is built that way, because of what happened in that room.
Working in small groups, students talked through where they'd already run into AI and what they wished they understood about it. Several were using AI tools for schoolwork and were unsure whether they were allowed to, or where the line was. Some had been told simply not to. Almost none had been taught how the tools work or how to tell when one is wrong, which is the gap the whole organization exists to close.
The relaxed setting made it easy to ask the honest questions that a formal classroom sometimes discourages — including the ones students are reluctant to raise in front of a teacher who might be grading them on it. Being high school students ourselves is most of why those questions got asked at all.
That first afternoon set the tone for everything since — approachable, student-led, and rooted in real conversation. It is also where our curriculum started: nearly every activity we now use came out of noticing what actually held a room's attention here, and what did not.
