MARS recently welcomed 150 Year 12 students and teachers, from local schools and colleges, to explore the maths powering modern AI systems. The taster days offered a glimpse of what it is like to study maths at university, combining interactive activities with insightful talks from staff and industry partners. Here is a little bit about what happened on the days.

To kick things off, students were introduced to MARS with a short welcome from one of our academics, before embarking on a series of engaging activities designed to showcase the maths underpinning AI.

Coding

Students were introduced to the concepts of random walks and diffusion, and how these relate to AI image generation. This session provided a hands-on opportunity to work with Python code while expanding students’ understanding of probability distributions, randomness, and the maths that enables AI to generate images from text prompts.

Sprouts

Through participation in this historic game, students explored the fundamentals of graph theory. They made predictions about possible outcomes, developed winning strategies, and competed to become the champion. Importantly, this session encouraged students to justify their reasoning, helping them to articulate the maths behind their discoveries. It also introduced them to the concept of graph neural networks (GNNs), a type of deep neural network architecture that has been used in applications ranging from drug discovery to anomaly detection for cyber security.

Large Language Models (LLMs)

An interactive talk highlighted how large language models (LLMs), like Claude and ChatGPT, use maths to generate sentences and ideas. Building on prior knowledge of conditional probability, vectors, and geometry, students gained insight into the foundations of the AI tools many of them use every day. This session highlighted the challenges and limitations of generative AI in both text and image production.

Of course, no successful day is complete without a well-earned lunch between activities, before moving on to a series of talks. MARS industry partners from companies such as Naimuri, Reliable Insights and Teleplan Forsberg, shared how they apply maths and AI to real-world products and businesses. Students also learnt about potential career paths and the opportunities available to them if they choose to study maths and AI at university.

The day concluded with closing remarks from one of our MARS academics and a chance for students to provide feedback.

We are grateful to the local schools and colleges who took the time to visit, and we hope the experience has inspired students to explore the exciting possibilities of learning more about real-world maths and AI.

We look forward to welcoming more students to future taster days.

The taster days were funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Disclaimer

The opinions expressed by our bloggers and those providing comments are personal, and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of Lancaster University. Responsibility for the accuracy of any of the information contained within blog posts belongs to the blogger.