Earn the Artificial Intelligence Honor
Three sessions, one field trip and a Bible study. You leave knowing how AI really works, what it cannot do, and where God fits in the picture.
How the honor fits together
The Artificial Intelligence Honor class is open to Pathfinders 10 and up. Most public AI chat tools require users to be at least 13 and minors to have a parent's permission, so in our classes students under 13 never create accounts: they use the AI Lab on this site, which runs in the browser and sends nothing anywhere, plus instructor-led demonstrations on the instructor's screen.
Session 1: What AI is
Definition, the ultimate goal, androids, the 12 terms with flashcards, and start your history chart board.
Session 2: AI in the real world
Helpful examples, limits, what only humans can do, and expert systems, with all three AI Lab demos.
Field trip: See AI at work
Visit a place that uses AI (a hospital imaging lab, a weather office, a farm, a library or an AI software team) and take notes.
Session 3: Present and reflect
Present your chart board and field trip, discuss AI's role in society, and the Bible study.
The honor is also one of the eight honors in the Modern Technology Master Award (earn seven of the eight). See the master award path.
What you will do, and when
Summarized in our words. The official list: Artificial Intelligence honor requirements
| Requirement | Where we do it |
|---|---|
1Explain what artificial intelligence is. | Session 1 |
2Make a chart board of AI history, alone or as a team, and present it. | Sessions 1 & 3 |
3Explain the ultimate goal of AI research. | Session 1 |
4Explain what an android is. | Session 1 |
5Define 12 AI terms: general and social intelligence, creativity, learning, motion, planning, perception, heuristic, pattern recognition, neural network, natural language processing, knowledge engineering. | Session 1 |
6Give three real-world examples of AI helping society. | Session 2 |
7Explain at least three limitations of AI. | Session 2 |
8Name basic human abilities AI cannot show. | Session 2 |
9Give a basic definition of an expert system. | Session 2 + AI Lab |
10List advantages of expert systems. | Session 2 |
11Give a real-world example of an expert system in use. | Session 2 |
12Discuss AI's importance and role in society, then present your findings. | Session 3 |
13Visit a place that uses AI and present what you saw. | Field trip |
14Bible study: human intelligence in Scripture (Genesis 1:26–27, Psalm 139, Psalm 8:3–6) compared with artificial intelligence. | Session 3 |
The instructor signs off each requirement as it is completed. Your club director awards the honor.
The basics, in plain words
What is AI? Computer systems that do tasks we usually think need human intelligence: recognizing speech and images, translating, making predictions, answering questions. Most of today's AI learns patterns from huge amounts of examples instead of following rules a person wrote line by line.
The ultimate goal? Many researchers aim for general intelligence: one system that can learn and reason across any task as well as a person. It does not exist yet, and people disagree about whether it can. That is a great discussion for requirement 12, and for the Bible study.
What is an android? A robot built to look and act like a human. It can copy a smile; it cannot have a soul.
The 12 terms: tap to flip
Quiz yourself before Session 1 ends. Say the meaning out loud, then flip to check.
Build your history chart board
Pick at least eight moments, draw or print a picture for each, and connect them on a timeline. In your talk, point out one time people trusted AI too much and one time it truly helped.
Helps, limits, and what only people can do
How AI helps
- Medical imaging that helps doctors spot disease earlier
- Live captions and translation, so a deaf or visiting guest can follow the sermon
- Weather and disaster warnings
- Search-and-rescue drones that spot a lost hiker from the air
- Catching fraud on bank cards
Where AI falls short
- It can be confidently wrong (“hallucinations”)
- It copies bias from the data it learned from
- It does not truly understand what it says
- It struggles with situations unlike its training
- It cannot take moral responsibility
What only people can do
- Love and be loved
- Know right from wrong and choose it (conscience)
- Worship and know God
- Real empathy: feeling with someone, not just sounding kind
- Live a life, with memories and purpose
Expert systems
Definition: a computer program that uses rules written from a human expert's knowledge to give advice, and can explain its reasoning.
Advantages: consistent every time, available day and night, keeps an expert's knowledge after they retire, shows how it decided, and costs less than an expert on call.
Real-world examples: one of the first, in the 1970s, recommended antibiotics for blood infections. Today, tax-preparation software, aircraft troubleshooting guides and loan-approval systems use the same idea.
Bible study: made, not manufactured
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.Genesis 1:27 (KJV)
I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.Psalm 139:14 (KJV)
What is man, that thou art mindful of him? ... For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.Psalm 8:4–5 (KJV)
Discuss as a group
- People make AI in their image: trained on human words and pictures. God made people in His image. What is the difference?
- Psalm 139 says God knew you before you were born. AI “knows” you from your data. Which kind of knowing do you want?
- Psalm 8 gives people dominion: responsibility for creation. What does responsible AI use look like for a Pathfinder?
- If a machine someday seems intelligent, is it a person? Why or why not?
Bring the honor to your club
Tell us your club, how many Pathfinders, their ages, and your preferred dates. In person in Maryland or online anywhere.
Felix Nieto II
AI Subject Matter Expert Founder & CEO, Nieto Engineering Inc.
“I don’t just talk about AI. I live it, day in and day out.”Felix Nieto II
Felix is not an AI user who picked up a few tricks. He designs, builds and runs state-of-the-art AI products in production. His career started at NASA Goddard as a high-school student working on early speech synthesis, one of the roots of today’s talking AI. It ran through 40+ years of engineering for DoD, NSA, DARPA and other federal agencies, senior engineering at Booz Allen Hamilton, and technical leadership at Amazon Web Services, where he designed DoD cloud architecture. Along the way he became an AI expert, applying AI and machine learning to defense and national-security work.
Today, at Nieto Engineering, he leads a portfolio of 60+ AI-based products. Every day he builds multi-agent AI systems, where specialized AI agents research, draft, score and hand work to each other; conversational voice agents that answer live business phone lines; AI chatbots grounded in a business’s own knowledge through retrieval-augmented generation; natural language processing and machine learning pipelines; and the guardrails, evaluation and safety filters that keep AI honest. When he teaches how AI works, he is describing what he built that morning.
- AI Subject Matter Expert: architects, builds and operates multi-AI systems in production
- Founder & CEO, Nieto Engineering Inc. (est. 1992): 60+ AI-based products for business, automotive and real estate
- Amazon Web Services: Senior Delivery Consultant and Technical Lead; DoD cloud architecture in GovCloud
- Booz Allen Hamilton and 40+ years of engineering for DoD, NSA, DARPA and federal agencies, including applied AI and machine learning
- Started at NASA Goddard in high school, on early speech synthesis
- Pathfinder club director, 2006 to 2019 · 1st Place Eagle Award · Leadership Instructor Trainer · Master Guide
- Co-founder of Nieto Ministries with his wife, Neusa