The first-ever SPARK NC student tech showcase at Vance County Schools’ Center for Innovation provided a glimpse into what’s been going on in the world of coding, AI training and high-tech learning over the past few years.

Community leaders, business owners and others gathered before the holiday break to see students demonstrate their projects, which included low-tech materials like Play-Doh and screwdrivers paired with computer code, joysticks and AI to produce creative sights and sounds.

As VCS Superintendent Dr. Cindy Bennett noted in her welcome to the showcase event, this type of hands-on creativity is what will fuel the next generation of careers. SPARK students will have an advantage in the “real world” because of the work they’re doing now. It’s work that looks an awful lot like fun.

It’s been three years since the SPARK lab was established in Vance County, one of the first 17 school districts to give this type of learning a whirl. Vance County is the first district, however, to offer this opportunity during the regular school day. Students come by bus to the lab for an elective class, but they can earn honor cords for graduation through their work with SPARK.

The students demonstrated their projects during a half hour or so of the afternoon’s activities. Davonte Yancey wrote code that he used to identify flowers based off a picture. “It’s trained off of images, and we tell it that these are all tulips, these are all orchids,” Yancey explained. “So when it sees something that it doesn’t know, it tells you the probability of what it could be.”

Kaylee Morgan made a piano that makes music “by conducting energy from you to the computer…the energy makes the device work,” Morgan explained. With the sounds of a computer-generated piano in the background, Morgan shared what she likes about the SPARK elective. “My favorite part was learning how all this works, and I find everything really interesting, especially training AI,” she said.

She trained the AI “to identify an object I hold up in front of the camera. I create 14 images without the object then I create the image with the object and then I train the AI,” she explained. “When I hold the object up, (in this case, a beverage container) it says 100 percent ‘drink’, but when I move it away, it says 100 percent ‘no drink.’”

Student Okito Sleugh used his curiosity about the use – and overuse – of Instagram to create a prototype app that could help reduce stress, anxiety, depression and cyberbullying through the app.

Following extensive research on Instagram, including examination of product reviews and observing peers as they interact with the wildly popular app, Sleugh created Instagram Safe Mode.

Not only does it “automatically block any bullying on the app, but it also shows break reminders, and you can also limit the amount of scrolls so you just don’t go scrolling for ever and ever all day,” Sleugh said. “This would make it safer for younger users and also just make it a healthier experience overall.”

Talk about real-world applications.

And it’s all being done in a SPARK NC lab in the Vance County Schools’ Center for Innovation.

Students in the SPARK elective are participating in Level 1, but VCS Chief Officer of Instruction and Innovation Dr. Destiny Ross-Putney said the next level is in the works.

Ross-Putney has been involved from the beginning, and she said the school district definitely took a risk when deciding to put SPARK in place.

“We didn’t know what it was going to look like,” she said. “We didn’t know if the kids were going to earn their credit in that first semester.”

Turns out, more than 70 percent of the students did earn that elective credit, which involved them taking a bit of a risk, too.

Unlike traditional high school classes, the SPARK classes involve “stackable modules” that allow students to try out a particular topic and then switch after a couple of weeks if they’re not interested.

Once they have successfully completed eight of these modules, they earn the elective credit.

“We needed something that looks different from what traditional school looked like,” Ross-Putney said. “We needed them to be able to get in there, get their hands in it, learn it very quickly, to see if they like it and then have the ability to leave if they weren’t interested…because that’s how the real world is…that’s how it is when they’re exploring careers.”

Aarika Sandlin, VCS Chief Officer of Communication & Innovative Support, said the state-of-the-art lab at the Center for Innovation provides high-tech, accelerated experiences for students, allowing them “to be a step ahead when they hit the career world.”

“We’re just grateful for the opportunity for our students to be ready for tomorrow, today,” she said.

CLICK PLAY to hear more and several of the students!