Volunteering for a Science Bowl Regional Competition

Every year the Georgia Tech School of Physics hosts a regional Science Bowl for Atlanta. High school students compete to see who can answer enough STEM¹ questions in a quiz-show format. I, along with some other graduate students, volunteer to host the event. Many of the questions come from chemistry, biology, and mathematics, but some are phrased like “Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are working on the [federal science program] studying [thing].” (The event also functions as advertising for national laboratories.)

This is the first year that I noticed that the Science Bowl had questions about machine learning, although the questions called it “AI”. This included questions like “which of the following are characteristic of GPUs and not CPUs,” questions about active learning, questions about AI for power grids, etc.

The high school students are also using LLMs to study for the Science Bowl. One student complained after a quiz round that, ChatGPT gave them incorrect answers when they were studying, which caused them to get an answer wrong in the competition. (I overheard another student talking about how they read a plant biology textbook a few months ago, so the old-school way of studying is still not dead yet.)