Schools have an increasing number of students with learning needs. Demand grows to meet need for the high proportion of those students with neurodiversity. This is especially so in the most socio-economically deprived communities.

In this talk we present our experience in a program teaching open source AI technology to school students aged 12-14 years. This program has been run in collaboration with Redbridge School, Southampton and the Electronics and Computer Science department of Southampton University.

We have been able to introduce these students to practical open source AI development. Through a range of projects they have been able to create their own gesture recognition systems and developed their own neural networks to solve a range of tasks. Open source has significantly driven this program, both in how it has been created, and in how it has shaped the students experience.

We believe this approach is a template that could be widely adopted.