Week 6 Small Group Discussion

Purpose

This week's small group discussion is the first half of a two-week arc. The Competency Demo for AI (CD #6) covers Week 6 content and is due this weekend — so this session is also your final structured preparation before you take it. Come having completed all five Week 6 topics.

By the end of your hour together, you should:

• Be able to explain core Week 6 concepts — agents, search, the learning taxonomy, decision trees, and neural networks — in plain language.
• Have worked through at least one perceptron calculation with your group.
• Have compared what you wrote in your AI pre-reflection to what Week 6 has taught you, and identified at least one thing that has shifted.
• Have formed an initial opinion on at least one of the Week 6 SEC scenarios.
• Feel confident about what the Competency Demo will ask and what you still need to review.

These are suggestions, not a script. If your group finds a thread more useful than anything on this page, pull on it.

Before You Meet

Complete all five Week 6 topics (6a–6e) and the SEC page, or get as far as you reasonably can. Then spend about 5 minutes on your 3-2-1 reflection. Write 1–2 sentences for each item — not a paragraph.

• 3 concepts from this week you feel most confident about heading into the demo
• 2 concepts you are least confident about and want the group to help you with
• 1 question about teaching or talking about AI with your students that you are still sitting with

Then do this one additional task: work a perceptron calculation by hand before you arrive. Bring scratch paper. A perceptron has inputs v₁=1, v₂=0, v₃=1 with weights w₁=3, w₂=−1, w₃=2 and threshold 4. What is the output? Be ready to walk the group through your work.

Then do this one additional task: pull up your AI pre-reflection on Blackboard and read what you wrote before Week 6 began. Find one sentence that now feels incomplete, oversimplified, or just plain wrong — and one sentence that still feels right. You will share both in the opening.

During Your Discussion

Opening: The Pre-Reflection Revisited (10 minutes)

Go around the group. Each person shares one sentence from their pre-reflection that now feels incomplete or wrong — and what specifically about Week 6 complicated it — and one sentence that still feels right. No one is graded on what they wrote. The point is to make the before-and-after contrast visible so the group can see where Week 6 has done its work, and where it has not yet.

Technical Practice (15–20 minutes)

Work through these together. Take turns explaining. Push back when something does not hold up.

• Perceptron calculation: Share the work you did before the meeting. Now change v₂ to 1 — what is the output? Explain what the negative weight on w₂ means for how the perceptron behaves.
• Agents and search: How would you explain to a student what an AI "agent" is, without using the word "smart" or "intelligent"? Walk someone through how BFS and DFS differ on the same small search problem.
• Decision trees vs. neural networks: Both are supervised learning techniques. What does a decision tree have that a neural network does not? What does a neural network have that a decision tree does not? Which would you use if you had to explain your reasoning to a parent?
• The learning taxonomy: Explain the difference between supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning using one concrete example of each.

The SEC Scenarios (10 minutes)

Choose one of the scenarios from the Week 6 SEC page — the one your group found most interesting or most uncomfortable. Spend ten minutes on it:

• What specific technical decision from Week 6 material sits at the root of the problem?
• Who had the clearest opportunity to make a different choice, and what would that have required?
• Is this a problem that better AI can solve, or a problem that requires something other than better AI?

Classroom Connections (5–10 minutes)

Share the question from your 3-2-1 about teaching AI with your students. Let the group react — would those approaches work at their grade level? What would need to change? Each person names one specific activity or conversation they plan to use with their students based on anything from this week.

Demo Preparation (5–10 minutes)

Use the confidence and uncertainty items from your 3-2-1 to structure this. Go around and name one thing you feel confident about and one thing you want to review before you take CD #6. Make a list of the unresolved questions. Decide which ones to bring to faculty and which ones to resolve through the course materials before the deadline.

After You Meet

• Review any topic that came up as uncertain during technical practice or the arc discussion.
• Take CD #6 when you feel ready. It is closed book and closed notes.
• Bring any remaining questions to the course Q&A or faculty office hours before the deadline.

Your Week 7 small group discussion will pick up where this one leaves off — covering reinforcement learning, unsupervised learning, and LLMs, and connecting both weeks together. Come to it having completed all of Week 7.