Artificial Intelligence (AI) is seeping into every aspect of the world, and White Station High School (WSHS) students are harnessing its power for good.
AI is technology that can perform tasks that typically need human input. In recent years, there has been an AI boom, with many companies competing to make the most of AI. Jobs are being created to develop and manage AI, while others are replaced in the blink of an eye. With the widespread use of different technologies — pagers in the 1980s, mobile phones in the 2010s, AI in the 2020s — students are placed at the heart of innovation.
“AI is the way of the future, so in order to make the most impact in our community and even just in the world in general, you need to be hopping on the stream,” Raymond Cui (11) said.
The Computer Science Association (CSA) was founded for students to learn about different computer science fields, like cybersecurity, programming and AI. Andrew Zhou (12) founded CSA in his 10th grade year to gain hands-on experience with technical work like developing code.
“Computer science is a rapidly developing field and computer literacy is starting to be just as important as actual literacy, English literacy, and I wanted to spread some awareness and get some hands-on experience,” Zhou said.
At its founding, CSA was focused on cybersecurity, but recently, it has branched out to AI. They have started a team to teach members how AI works and how to use it to create projects. Using AI is more than just putting in a question and getting an answer; it has to process what is being asked and interpret what is being said, requiring many different components. CSA has hosted workshops to develop AI literacy among members.
“In order to use a tool, you need to understand how it works,” Zhou said. “That’s what I’m going to be focusing on earlier in the year in terms of AI, and then later on we’re going to be building our own little AI projects in order to … have some community impact because … [what] use is learning something if you’re not using it.”
Additionally, students are using AI to teach about health issues. AImpact was founded by Cui and Ashish Kalaga (10) this year to create initiatives to try and help the community with public health issues like human papillomavirus (HPV) and drug use. Cui was already using AI products to predict different health issues based on data, and after competing in the epidemiology event for Health Occupations Students of America (HOSA), which focuses on health and disease in populations, he noticed that Memphis had a lot of public health-related issues.
“From January to May of 2026, we’re going to make our members apply their knowledge about AI and public health, combine them, and make small, impactful projects that could be implemented [in] their community,” Kalaga said.
This year, AImpact plans to compete in the Intel AI Festival and the Presidential AI Challenge and bring speakers in to teach their members about AI and public health. Cui and Kalaga are committed to helping the underserved communities in Memphis.
“Our flagship project is about using AI to help drug prevention in Memphis … we are making a chatbot to help spread awareness about drugs,” Cui said.
However, AI has its issues so Code Mentors hosted their very first EthicsAI event, a writing competition, where participants proposed a piece of legislation that could regulate AI without limiting its innovation. Gregory Taylor (12) won third place for his idea.
“My idea was to have a board … able to recommend a solution,” Taylor said. “It’s not set in stone that this will be the law going forward, but it is a panel of people that will come together and say, ‘Hey, we should change this part,’ and I think having a federal board [will help] to keep it from growing to being dangerous [and instead] being [used for] innovation and great for our lives.”
Code Mentors helps students taking computer science by being an alternative to tutoring, since tutoring is only given for core subjects. Members who have previously taken a computer science class mentor students currently taking computer science.
“The purpose of Code Mentors is to help others who are taking coding classes be able to grow their knowledge of coding and to get better,” Taylor said. “In the future, we plan to mentor those students and to just drive for AI to be used in ethical ways.”