Sunny Wu for NPR
Up until recently, 16-year-old Esraa Elsharkawy was an artificial intelligence skeptic.
“I just thought AI just was kind of creepy,” she says.
She worried the technology would take jobs away from humans, and she didn’t understand how it worked — but she wanted to learn more.
The only problem: She couldn’t get that kind of education at her high school in Katy, Texas. Her school district only recently provided all students from third grade through 12th with their own Chromebook, and Elsharkawy says she had to teach herself how to code.
For years, research has shown there’s a digital divide when it