To give a bit more on the kind of the work we do, we start with young people in elementary school under the age of 12 years old. They're usually eight or nine years old. Research shows that young girls in particular, if they're not given opportunity and not shown activities and things that relate to things they care about in their lives—particularly when we're talking about technology—are then most likely to think they're not smart enough and not good enough, and they don't see themselves in those pathways.
As well, as we know already, there are not many women role models and mentors for them to look up to, so we need to start that process with the very young. It is known that young girls tend to gravitate towards wanting to work on projects where they see themselves being able to have a social impact in their communities.
We have created a social innovation lab, where we bring young people together using the UN SDGs as a framework and have them think about what problem they see in their own community, or in Canada or in a larger community, where they'd want to solve the problem and how AI could help solve that problem in a responsible way. That piques their curiosity. As was mentioned, that's where everything starts. In fact, for all of us, if we look back in our lives, it's usually curiosity that drove us to do the things we do today. That is very important.
Yes, the government federally is not in charge of education per se, but we are funded partially by the federal government through the ministry for innovation, through Minister Joly's office at ISED. We have been funded in the past to help flow funds to not-for-profit and civil society organizations like ours, to work both in the education system but outside of education as well. We're very aware that some young people learn best in different settings, and they're not necessarily going to attach to the programs at school as the things they care about most.
To give an example of a data and AI project we did with young people, it was around sports and basketball. We went out onto the basketball court with young people instead of making them sit in a classroom behind a computer. We started to ask them questions about who they thought was going to win the game, and why they thought that. Suddenly they realized that they are data scientists and they know a lot of information. We built an AI model with them to figure out who was going to win the game.
I think there are a lot of creative ways for government to fund youth programs. Libraries are an incredible space, where we could have more of this kind of interactive hands-on learning, because that's how young people are really going to learn best. As well, we ran our first parent and youth event during the All In AI conference in Montreal a few weeks ago, to help build trust in the community, with parents alongside young people.