Empowering Youth to Create with IT/AI
IT & Generative AI Workshops
Executive Summary of the Project
Project Overview: As AI technologies emerge as the epicenter of the future, young people often find themselves relegated to the margins, merely as consumers rather than active participants. This project seeks to reverse the equation, empowering youth to contribute with their creative solutions based on the cutting-edge IT and AI technologies. By channeling the energy currently spent on social media consumption—which often has negative health implications—into productive technological design and creation, we aim to empower youth to contribute significantly to a fair and responsible technological future.
Vision: To create a future where young people are at the forefront of designing and developing with AI technologies that prioritize sustainability and equity.
Mission: To provide young individuals aged 14-19 with the tools, knowledge, and opportunities to become leaders in AI technology, fostering a responsible & inclusive technological future.
Sunday, January 12th 2025: Understanding Websites, Security and SEO [French]
This workshop is meant for youth who have very limited or no IT knowledge, but they want to understand enough to be able to successfully negotiate website creation for their business or organization. You will learn about domain, hosting, performance, content delivery networks (CDNs), and the concepts will be illustrated using analogy to food distribution. We will proceed with how to keep your website on top of Google searches (SEO – search engine optimization), and the basics of Security on Internet. We will discover differences between authentication, authorization and will cover common practices such as 2-step authentication. Then, we will give practical advise on how to safely create and keep your passwords (illustrating the point using the analogy to house locks), and how to transfer sensitive data between organizations using digital signatures and asymmetric encryption. We will also talk about phishing and some famous security incidents on the web, including how Zuckenberg’s account on Facebook was hacked. Finally, we will learn about differences between vulnerability and malware, as well as ways to protect your website from them using continuous scanning, firewalls and backups.
Price: 10CHF (free for refugees)
Sunday, March 9th 2025: No-code Web app building (Laptop needed) [French]
In this workshop, you’ll get hands-on experience building a simple web app using generative AI programming frameworks. We will use prompts in French (akin to ChatGPT) to generate apps. No prior programming experience is needed! Keep in mind, AI tools can help speed up development, but creating a full product will still involve some effort and learning. We have couple of options for the app:
- Build your own private social network,
- Game of Life, or some board game (you can define rules),
- Coordinate a sport event among friends,
- Start a massive but targeted email advertisement campaign for a brand/product.
You need to bring your own laptop. After you register, we’ll send you the framework installation details via WhatsApp.
Price: 10CHF (free for refugees)
Sunday, March 23rd 2025: Become a Digital Artist & Filmmaker
(Laptop needed) [French]
In this workshop, the youth will write a story (we recommend not using AI tools for this step in order to foster creativity). Then we will create images from the story: either by using text-to-image AI tools, or by breathing life into your simple (paper) sketches by using AI tools to add details and beautiful colors. Using another set of tools, the youth will generate animations/video based on the storyline and the generated images from the previous step. Finally, we will generate some background music and voice-over to complete the filmmaking experience!
No prior AI or design knowledge is needed! You need to bring your own laptop. After you register, we’ll send you tools installation details via WhatsApp.
Price: 10CHF (free for refugees)
Registration Form
We will provide details on tools setup via WhatsApp shortly before respective workshops. By submitting the form, you also agree to get information about future IT workshops.
Workshop Location: Centre Social Adventiste,
Av. Édouard Dapples 2bis, 1006 Lausanne: Google Maps
Instructors are experienced Software Engineers who are EPFL graduates.
