AI Innovation Corner

These articles are part of the FIRST Tech Challenge AI Innovation Corner. This is a place where we’ll post custom and curated articles relevant to FIRST Tech Challenge as it relates to AI and its impact on our daily lives and the world around us. We would like to thank Google for their generous contributions to FIRST Tech Challenge to increase access to our program in underserved communities and for providing sponsorship and occasional technical direction for this content.

Articles are ordered on this page chronologically, with the newest content at the top of the page expanded. Just click to expand any other articles you’d like to see.

Week of 10/21/2024 “AI for Social Media”

This week in this AI Innovation Corner we’re going to be exploring using AI for helping you take the first steps that every FIRST Tech Challenge team needs to do, which is to increase your team’s social media presence. Specifically, we’re going to focus on social media campaigns and team marketing, which can be a critical step to increase the visibility of your team in the community. This can help you with recruitment of team members and mentors, spreading awareness of yourselves and FIRST, and is one great step towards helping you with fundraising (which we’ll cover in more detail in a future article).

If you’ve never started a social media campaign for a FIRST Tech Challenge team, you might have some ideas about how to get started but you need some direction and some more “concrete” examples pertaining to where to start, what to create content about, and even where to post/host your content. Gemini can be a great start in your brainstorming process. This simple prompt can yield loads of valuable feedback:

I have a high school FIRST Tech Challenge Team. What are things I need to consider when starting my first social media campaign?

Once you’ve got a presence and start working through content, through social media you’ll engage with lots of folks. It can sometimes be difficult to find the right way to interact with the community at large, and responders who love (or are critical of) your content. AI to the rescue! AI can help you find different ways of interacting - though remember the ultimate responsibility on what to post is up to you, AI should only be used as a means of brainstorming and/or refining what you want to say.

Write a friendly, one-sentence response to the following social media comment that shows appreciation for the comment and encourages the user to turn on post notifications for more content from our FIRST Tech Challenge team.

Can’t think of prompts to ask/use, or are you looking for some inspiration? AI can help you there as well. You can ask AI to help you with building AI prompts (asking the AI what to ask the AI is a pro tip!), brainstorming ways to use AI for social media, and ways to accentuate what you do on social media. Be sure to keep “ FIRST Tech Challenge ” in your prompts so that the AI relates what you’re asking it to the competition so that the suggestions it makes are relevant to your team and your activities.

Can you tell me some common AI prompts for generating social media posts for my FIRST Tech Challenge team?

Finally, it’s important to track your social media progress in order to determine what’s going well, optimize your strategy for content in the future, and determining where you’re getting the most “bang” for your content-production “buck.” We can use the following prompt to ask AI to give us some tips on the best ways to track our online footprint:

How can I track my team’s progress on social media?

Remember, social media is a marathon, not a race. It requires careful planning, continuous improvement, consistency in creating content, and the desire to build your team’s brand. Hard work and determination can pay off, and AI can help guide you along the way!

Week of 09/30/2024 “AI Competition Manual Assistant”

AI Competition Manual Assistant

In our first article, the Google AI Studio was introduced as a tool to interact with Google’s Gemini AI. Gemini is one of several flagship Large Language Models (LLM’s) that have been meticulously trained on massive amounts of text data to learn the patterns and relationships between units of language - these models have actually learned how to recognize text-based language, read and understand data, and synthesize what it learned to predict and interpret future data. This is the exact process humans make in learning and understanding the world around us! In Google AI Studio, users can interact with the Gemini AI through “prompts” to perform tasks for them. Prompts are instructions or queries given to an AI in order to generate a response - the quality of the response is often directly related to the quality of the prompt. Through these prompts, Gemini can provide responses based on the massive dataset that it has been pre-trained with, or users can also provide additional documents, text, or media that the AI has never seen before. These multimodal prompts, or prompts that include multiple types of content, can be very beneficial in interacting with an AI using content that is specific to a niche area like FIRST Tech Challenge. Can you think of ways to put this ability to good use in FIRST Tech Challenge?

In FIRST Tech Challenge, one of the first tasks teams have to do is to read and understand the FIRST Tech Challenge Competition Manual. This can be a very painstaking task, and even a skilled reader can miss subtle nuances provided by the manual. However, an AI can break down and analyze the manual in a matter of seconds, usually preserving the nuance provided in the document. Users can then interact with the AI that has analyzed the Competition Manual, and prompt the AI to provide insights - these questions might involve locating specific information likely found in the Competition Manual, summarize important rules or processes, or even involve asking the AI to make a best guess. Through a process known as “role playing” the user can prompt the AI to take on a role or persona and direct the AI to follow specific rules as it interacts with the user in subsequent prompts. The remainder of this article is a tutorial on how to set up a “role playing” session with the Google Gemini AI through Google AI Studio to analyze and answer questions based on the FIRST Tech Challenge 2024-2025 Competition Manual for the INTO THE DEEP presented by RTX season. While some of the nuanced elements (like AI prompting) will be shallowly covered in this article, it is something we’ll cover a lot more in future articles.

Creating an AI expert using Google AI Studio is fairly straightforward - the hard part is creating the proper prompt, and there we’ve got you covered.

Step 1 - First, log into Google AI Studio. You can do this by clicking the “Sign in to Google AI Studio” button on the front page of the Google AI Studio home page. You will need a Google account in order to do this - getting one is left as an exercise to the reader. The Google account is used to store your Google AI Studio prompt sessions and any content you upload to the model, and to track usage of the Gemini APIs.

Step 2 - Let’s download the FIRST Tech Challenge Competition Manual to your local computer. You can always find the latest Competition Manual PDF at the following link:

https://ftc-resources.firstinspires.org/file/ftc/game/manual

Step 3 - In the left navigation pane towards the top of the pane, there is a circle with a plus inside it with the text “Create new prompt” next to it. Clicking on this button will start a new prompt - though if you’re using Google AI Studio for the first time it’s likely a new prompt is already open.

Now that we have a new prompt, you can give the prompt a name. This will allow the prompt to be saved in your “My Library” so you can come back and interact with the prompt later without having to recreate the prompt session every time.

In the bottom center of the workspace is a text field where you can enter in your prompt (it has a default prompt of “Type something”). BEFORE we enter our prompt, we want to add our Competition Manual PDF document. To add the document, click the “Plus” icon to the right of the prompt area. This will give you several options, choose “Upload to Drive”. You can either click the “Browse” button to browse for the PDF of the Competition Manual that you downloaded, or you can drag the file into the window. This adds the Competition Manual to your prompt, it may take a minute or two to upload the PDF so please be patient.

Google AI Studio Screen — Creating a prompt in Google AI Studio

Step 4 - Now that we have our document uploaded, we now want to enter our prompt. This prompt directs the AI in how to manage its responses, what information to use when developing a response, and sets up the role that the AI will attempt to play. Enter the following prompt and press the “Run” button:

You are a helpful AI assistant providing answers to questions about the provided PDF. Do not use any prior knowledge; you have everything you need to answer questions in the one PDF provided. Cite all references.

Once the AI processes the initial prompt, we can then ask questions that the AI will use the Competition Manual to answer. Depending on the question, it may take the AI between several seconds up to a couple minutes to answer - be patient! Here are several questions you can ask (remember to press the “Run” button after asking each question):

Example sample questions:

How many SAMPLES is a ROBOT allowed to CONTROL at a time?
What are the different ways to score points?
How large can a ROBOT be in its STARTING CONFIGURATION?
Which awards are best for advancement?
How do I write a strong engineering portfolio?

Some prompts that require a lot of complex understanding or strategy can yield results that are not correct, especially if there is information “understood but not supplied.” For example, the following prompts provide some correct and some incorrect information:

Examples of difficult questions:

What is the maximum score for an alliance?
Can ROBOTS pick up an opposing ALLIANCE’S SAMPLES?
How many matches does a team play at an event?

This example was specific to FIRST Tech Challenge, but this process can be used for virtually any documents or media. Using AI as an analysis assistant can help you summarize news articles, find specific instructions in user manuals, review books, and more! Remember that the quality of the responses the AI provides is directly related to the quality of the prompt provided - even so, the AI isn’t always going to be able to provide correct answers so it’s up to you to verify the correctness of all answers provided by an AI.