AI Play summer camp brings hands-on learning to digital game design

Source Domain: www.elon.edu

More than a dozen middle school students participated in Elon University’s inaugural week-long day camp that explored the fundamentals of artificial intelligence.

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Elon University hosted its inaugural AI Play summer camp this month for rising middle school students with interest in the world of artificial intelligence.

Thirteen students participated in AI Play, held June 15-19 in Lindner Hall on Elon’s campus, where they learned about artificial intelligence while improving their AI literacy.

Middle school students participated in AI Play, held June 15-19 in Lindner Hall.

“The camp provides a way for students to get interested in this technology in an unplugged way,” said Alexis Goslen, an assistant professor or computer science. “We used a lot of ‘unplugged’ activities that do not involve computers like ‘Guess Whose Face,’ a game where the students act as the facial recognition system and we introduce the concepts by connecting it to unlocking your phone.”

Students participated in several hands-on learning activities that introduced concepts about pathfinding, perception and machine learning, speech recognition and more.

“We did an activity about facial recognition and that was really cool to see how AI uses facial recognition in our everyday devices and how a few viewpoints can map out entire facial features,” said Trisha Anna, a seventh grader at Durham Academy in Durham, North Carolina.

Trisha Anna at Elon AI Play Summer camp at Lindner Hall on June 15, 2026.

The camp focused every day on a “big idea” of an artificial intelligence concept. Students learned about concepts and worked in groups to apply the concept before ending with a group discussion on ethics.

“The ethics discussions were my favorite part of camp,”…

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