Hi, everyone. Kumar Dattatreyan here with Agile Meridian and the Meridian Point. And we are live for another episode of our show. Today, we're going to continue a discussion we had with one of our partners, Chris Daily. A few weeks ago, we posted an episode about his summer project or projects. And today we're going to continue with that theme and see what Chris has been up to. If you remember, the last episode with Chris was about his work with the STEM program in Indianapolis, working with underprivileged kids, helping them learn real-world skills in science and technology. It's a fascinating episode, and really, kudos to him and the program, the grant that really made that possible.
So let me bring Chris on. We're gonna talk about another project that he's had a lot of success with. Hey Chris, good to see you again.
Chris: Hey Kumar, how's it going?
Kumar: It's going well, thank you. So when we talked last time, you mentioned this other thing that you were very excited about, which was an internship program for high school kids. I think I have that right. And this was not through a grant, was it? It was through Blazing Academy. Is that right?
Chris: Yeah. So 1150 Academy changed its name to Blazing, and it's under... we started out as 1150 in this program and then we rebranded our name. We're in the process of rebranding 1150 now to Blazing. So it's kind of confusing, but it's all the same.
Kumar: Yeah. And so this program, tell us about it. What's unique about it and what made it so rewarding for you?
Chris: Okay. So we got notice in my role in 1150 as VP of Learning, we got notice that we were approved provider for a grant where we could get paid money to be able to go out and build a work-based learning grant with an internship. So it's, you have to do at least 24 hours of training and then 75 hours of a paid internship for high school students. And they need to be in 10th, 11th, or 12th grade.
So given that we had five weeks' notice, we were really struggling because to get an internship, you traditionally go out to a corporation and you talk to them. We take a couple interns and they say yes. And then when the interns show up, the organization's not prepared, right? They don't do that all the time. They only do it occasionally.
So instead of taking the students and having the students go to the organizations, we had the organizations come to the students. We created five sites in Indianapolis. We hired site managers. We bought all the equipment. We then trained the students on AI. So we put them through 24 hours of AI training. And it was led by me. We did it virtually. We did everybody at the same time. And then we did a second set of that because we had some students that started late.
When they got done with my training, what we did is we then rolled them into a paid internship with 1150. So rather than being an employee of Eli Lilly, or Betty's Hair Salon, they're employees of 1150. And then we paid them. So we went out and we tried to source the internship projects that they were going to do during that internship.
Prior to that, knowing that we only had five weeks and most people, we spent the first three weeks just figuring out what we were going to do. So we didn't really have a lot of time to go out and talk to organizations. So what we did was by creating these five sites, we essentially created five little businesses. And so the businesses then ran with a site manager who we hired. We as 1150 paid them. We provided all the computer equipment and everything. And then the students, the interns, would go off and they would pick their projects, right? And they'd go through and they'd work on those.
We allowed them to pick what they wanted to do. We also allowed them to pick or to promote the idea of other projects, which might be their passion. And the reason for that is, as I talked about in our last podcast, was basically that if you get kids that are engaged, they're going to learn better. They're going to learn quicker. It's going to be more self-motivated. You're not going to be dragging them along, right? Talking PowerPoint them to death. They're going to do good work.
So we allowed them to choose their own projects and they worked with our list and they went through. And what we found was we created almost 200 different kinds of books. We created 40-some odd GPTs, custom GPTs, ranging from everything from Fortnite to Grand Theft Auto to a virtual assistant to a project management one, a product owner GPT, all these different kinds of GPTs.
In addition, there were probably about, I'm guessing, maybe 10 student businesses that were already operating where the students used the time to create an email sequence for themselves, to create marketing brochures, to create an e-book about their business that they could give away or sell. And it was fascinating. A couple of them wanted to do autobiographies on themselves. It was just fascinating to watch them.
It was fun because we gave them the tools. And, you know, the same thing I said the last time we chatted applied here. It didn't really matter whether the students came from what neighborhood, where they came from, what zip code they lived in, what school they went to. It was a matter of giving them the technology, giving them the tools, and getting the hell out of the way. And just letting them go. Let them figure out what it was they wanted to do.
And there are some great stories that came out of this. We had the IHSAA, the Indiana High School Athletic Association, that governs all high school sports, come to us. I happen to know the guy who's the CIO. So I went over there and talked to him and he said, "You know, I could really use a chatbot that has the rules manuals in it, the bulletin." The bulletin comes out every winter and spring, and it basically outlines all the things for the sport that's going on in that period, right? And their policy and procedures manual.
And so our students, we gave it to a team of students and they went off and they developed this chatbot. They had to test it, right? You don't just take AI and just throw something together and throw it out there. They tested it. They tweaked their configuration. They tweaked the prompting that they were doing. They went back and had to tweak the input data that they used to train the GPT. And they got that done relatively quickly, and then they were asked to be able to demo it to the IHSAA.
So they went out, and this is amazing to me, they stood up a server on a kid's machine, right, and then stood up a server and then mocked up the actual IHSAA website and put this chatbot on there so that they could actually show it. We brought the CIO, Luke Moorhead, we brought him over to our facility. He took a look at it. He's like, "This is great. You guys did a great job. Would you come and show this at the IHSAA?" So the team went over there along with Kyle Donahue, who is my program director at 1150. And the four of us went over and they explained it to the executive committee of the IHSAA. And the IHSAA is like, "Wow, this is fantastic."
We ended up getting a testimony. And it's incredible what these kids can do. I say kids, right? These young adults can do. I was so impressed with these kids after working with them, going through and doing training with them for a week. And then a couple of weeks of work that we paid. We, being 1150, had an AI conference at the end of June. And we spent the money to bus all the kids from all five sites to the conference and had the kids there. And then we used them in my presentations. Rather than me talking, which you and I have known each other for quite a while now, right? I can go on and on and on. Rather than me talking and then listening to me, I had the students get up and talk about their experiences.
Yeah. Right. And they were incredible. They stood up in front of a group of, in some cases, 250 people and stood up and talked about their project and talked about what they learned from it. And they didn't know any better. Right. You and I would be nervous. Right. Yeah. First time I spoke, I was scared to death. They had no fear. They just stood up.
Kumar: Oh, they were passionate about it. They were full of that passion, that learning, and they wanted to share it. So I can see how that would be really empowering for anyone.
Chris: Yeah. There were some interesting things that I observed as well. The sites were set up so that the way we did that intentionally was it didn't matter what school you went to. If the school was a site, we allowed people that maybe didn't go to that school, but it was convenient to go there. And what we saw was that students from different schools would work together in teams. Right. It wasn't like "I'm from Fishers High School" and, you know, "I'm from Westfield." They work together as a team and learn from each other and bonded together. And it was just, and it was organic, right?
You and I preach all the time about self-organization, right? And the fact that if you give boundaries and you create a framework and then let the people use their brains. It was just incredible how that worked out in this program. And it, again, it didn't matter what site.
What I'm particularly proud of and what I'm particularly excited about is that we had two locations, one at Eastern Star Church and the other one at a place called KIPP Legacy High School that are on the far east side of Indianapolis. They're inside of the loop, right, the main loop. And these are some of the lowest, when you look at the zip codes and what people make, there's some of the lowest income averages in the area. We were able to get 25 students into those two locations, which, and it, again, it was phenomenal to see what they did.
You know, it's really, I can't, you know, I know I'm blathering on here, but it's really impressive to see what these kids can do. And, you know, there's a lot of discussion inside 1150, now Blazing Academy, on how we do this again, right? Because the outcomes are incredible.
We did have last week, well, actually earlier this week, I did have a reporter reach out to me to ask about the program. And we actually put a couple of our students, a couple of our AI proteges, as we call them, our AI proteges are actually speaking to reporters to talk about their experiences.
Kumar: So more publicity for the program itself and the success it's had. And of course, the students, they're happy, I'm sure, happy to talk about what they've learned with whoever wants to listen to it. It's really an interesting case study on self-organization and the power of giving people sort of a vision, a goal, and then getting out of their way. These kids, I'm sure they had a tremendous experience just as you did.
What do you see? I'm going to get to another question later on because I'm all these thoughts running rumbling around my head with the work that we do with adults in the workplace, in the modern workforce, and how different that is from what you're able to create, the environment you were able to create for these kids.
In fact, just a couple of weeks ago, I interviewed an HR expert, and we were talking about engagement, workforce engagement. And she said the number one reason why people are disengaged at work is because, well, of course, their boss, if their boss is too overbearing and too micromanaging, of course, that's one reason for it. But really, the number one reason is that their environment doesn't support independent thinking or even the tools that they use don't always work or there are too many of them and stuff like that.
And so the fact that you're able to teach these kids how to use something that augmented their own intelligence and unleashed their creativity is really amazing. And I'm wondering, you know, has this been done anywhere that you know of, a program like this?
Chris: Not that I've been able to find. It seems to be unique. There's not a lot of, hasn't been at least historically a lot of grants or anything like that or ways to figure out how to pay for it. I know there are, have been attempts at like apprenticeship programs where they'll spend more time in training and then they'll go in for a year or two years. And I know that that is what a lot of people believe is going to be next is that we're going to revert back to apprenticeship programs.
As we go through the great, this great next evolution, right? We're moving from the current state to one that's augmented with AI and jobs are going to change. So we're going to have a lot of retraining efforts, but I think we're one of the few that's able to figure this, figure out something different. I know when we talked to the state, they were absolutely, you know, our partners at the state, they were thrilled at what we had done.
Kumar: I mean, it's an opportunity to replicate this with, you know, maybe in other areas in Indianapolis, but also in other states. You know, this kind of a program could be so powerful to introduce kids to AI and they're probably already using it anyway. They're much more adept at the technology that's available today than us old people. But the fact that what you were able to show them was a use for it that was, again, that unleashed their creative potential in a work setting.
And so, I mean, the fact that you paid them for this, right, you created these companies and they got paid for the work that they did. That's gotta be really meaningful for them as well. Like they went to this program, they learned something, they created something, they created their own businesses, some of them, and now they have a skill they can use for the rest of their lives.
Chris: Yeah, we, it was, it was very, yeah, there are a lot of them that have businesses that, you know, were, that were already ongoing. There are a number that are going to start. I think the message that I tried to convey was all you need in today's society, today's technical space is a Chromebook, and you can create a business.
When you and I started out, you had to make something, and then you had to go out and sell it, and you had to do all this. You couldn't just hit 5,000 people on an email list. You had to do third-class mailings and you had to go out and knock on doors. It was just much harder to start a business. Today, all a kid needs is a Chromebook.
We're printing sweatshirts. We're selling sweatshirts. We created the design and there's a company that when the sweatshirts are ordered, the company just prints them, puts the images on them, creates a sweatshirt, and just mails it to them. We don't even touch it.
Kumar: That's interesting. We didn't have those opportunities. I think it's really powerful for kids today to be able to do that. Right. And giving them the tools and the means to use their minds and their creativity to create these business streams, really, these income streams for themselves.
I'm just wondering, so when you took this demo to, I forget what the association was or the organization was, I'm curious what their reaction was. These kids that have just been in this program for I don't know how many weeks, turning out this chatbot that I'm sure looked really professional and provided the results that their engineers internally haven't been able to produce. What was that reaction?
Chris: It was interesting because it was, you know, they had come in and done this and they did it. They not only just created the chatbot, right, which could look, UI on that could just be very rudimentary. They took it to the next step and made it, you know, made it, showed what it would look like on the website. And so, and they did this, I mean, literally they started on it and were finished in about a week, right? In four-hour days.
So, you know, they turned it out, they divvied it up, they combined everything, right? They integrated the chatbot. And when they showed it to the executive committee, they looked at the IHSAA, the CIO of the IHSAA and said, "When can we have this? Can we have it now?" And he's like, "Well, we got to figure out how to do this in our framework, right? We got to figure out how to make it, you know, we got to figure out how to make it integrated into our website." And, yeah, it was pretty interesting.
Kumar: Well, just get the kids to figure that out. They could probably do it in a week.
Chris: They probably could, yeah.
Kumar: Yeah, it's interesting, you know, that the culture in an organization is different. It's so resistant to this kind of innovation, this innovation mindset that these kids have, you know, because they don't know any better, right? They haven't been jaded by modern work environments to know any better, so they're like, "Oh this is cool, I'm gonna learn this and I'm gonna get paid for it and you know, uh, this old guy over here, he's gonna teach me AI, awesome!" You know, no offense.
Chris: No offense. And one of the things we talked about, I talked about with them a lot was that AI is going to be, um, you know, one of the things I talked to them about was this is not the end, but really the beginning of their journey. And they need to, you know, they need to use problem-solving, complex thinking, right? Iterative and incremental, those kinds of activities, those soft skills that you and I talk about all the time, those skills were embedded in what we were trying to do.
And it really helped them, being the kids, to understand that they can apply what they learned in our internship program, our AI protege program, as we call it. The skills they learn, they can apply to mechanical engineering, industrial engineering. They can apply it to journalism. They can apply it to anything that they're doing because that's really the way the world works is you start out with something simple, you get it to work, and then you evolve it a little bit. Then you evolve it a little bit more, and you evolve it a little bit more until you get to a finished product. And they ate that up. I'm really excited about how they're, I'm really excited to see what, how they proceed and what it looks, you know, what they look like in five years, 10 years.
Kumar: Yeah. I'm definitely inspired by the story as well. And I'm actually thinking of, I don't know if you're open to it, but writing a case study for this. There's so many angles, right? Case study to help kids in other states do the same kind of thing, implement programs like this in other communities, especially underserved communities, to teach kids these skills to help them become whatever they're going to become, right?
Um, there's that and then there's also the aspect of using this as a case study to remind organizations, you know, especially the ones that we serve, right? And in our coaching, the coaching work that we do, the power of self-organization and innovation thinking and innovation mindsets and what it can do, right? So if you just relax the controls a little bit and give people the environment they need to be successful. What are your thoughts there?
Chris: Yeah, I think there's definitely a case study there. I think it's, you know, we being 1150 are looking now at what we're going to set up for the fall and for the spring. And I think that this is perfect as a test bed, right? We talked about in our last podcast, we talked about how I use VR. We used AI. We used Minecraft for education to let the kids explore. Right. And I think it's a perfect... I think this environment is a perfect way to show that, yes, you can change. You can embrace it. You can use it if you just go in with the mindset of a high schooler. A 10th grader, you go in, just go in with a 10th grader mindset and be open to change and see what you can do with it. I mean, it's absolutely a great case study.
Kumar: Yeah, let's work on that. I'd love to help you or just sort of put something together like that. Any closing thoughts on this topic or how you may, you know, what are your plans for this besides what we just talked about?
Chris: Well, we're looking at 1150 or Blazing. We're now looking at how we can do it during the fall and spring. You run into real challenges with kids if you go to an after-school program. How much good learning are they going to have after they've spent all day in school, right?
Kumar: Not much.
Chris: Yeah. So what we're looking at is we're thinking about how we can take this model and evolve it so that instead of what we did in six or eight weeks, how do we spread that out over the school year? And we're looking at geographically, how do we do that around Indianapolis? We're kind of in the east side sort of area. We didn't really have anything on the northwest side, the west side or the southwest side or even the south side, really. So we're really looking at how we can do that, how we can grow it.
The model scales because we take the approach of my favorite approach, right? And you've heard me say this, I'm not running a daycare. So each site operates independently and has a site manager who's from that community. So we're looking at how we can do that, how we can expand it and how we can continue to support the evolution of our students as they go forward.
You mentioned they're using AI in school, right? From an educational standpoint. They are, but it's a one-off, right? What I've done, what you've done, is we go and we use it for a series of activities, not just a one-off. We don't sit down and say, how do you write this email? We talk about things like write an email, write a series of emails in a sequence. Right. To support a funnel. Right. We write a book. Right. We don't just sit down and say, give me a title. Give me a catchy title. Give me an outline. Give me an expanded chapter one. Right. Section one of subchapter one. Oh, that doesn't look right, let's iterate through. We use it for process, right, and you have to take it and step it through.
The kids, they're using it like, "Hey, write my physics paper," and it's a one-off. They copy and paste it. The teachers know it's copy and pasted, okay? They can tell. How do we take it and evolve it? I think with the kids, we've shown them how they can go do that, how they can create.
Kumar: That's great. It's an evolution, right? So helping the kids use AI, but not just trusting it 100% and just copying and pasting something that it spits out. It's actually working with it, collaborating with it in a way to get the result that you want.
So yeah, I think that's great. I would also like to maybe in a future episode talk about how these principles can be applied to organizations, right? So how can we help take this case study and say, look, it works for kids. Why can't you all think like 10th graders or 11th graders? Have that sort of that open mindset, that beginner's mind, if you will, right? To say to yourself, "Hey, I'm going to look at everything with a beginner's mind. I'm going to try to not pretend like I know everything that there is to know about this topic, even though I may. I'm going to look at it with fresh eyes." So that would be a great outcome, I think, for this and for society at large.
Chris: Let's do it. Let's get the case study and let's have another session.
Kumar: Yeah, it'd be awesome. All right, well, thanks a lot, Chris. This is fascinating. I'm really inspired again, as I was a few weeks ago when we had that last chat. So appreciate your time. Thanks for joining us. See you all next time. Bye.
