The York School 2024/25 Year in Review - Using AI-powered voice commands to drive cars

The Personal Project gives students in Grade 10, the final year of the IB Middle Years Program, an opportunity to independently explore an area of personal interest over a three-month period. The project assesses students’ self-management, research, communication, critical and creative thinking, and collaboration skills. Students are encouraged to choose multi-layered, multidisciplinary projects that have a purpose or value outside the school. They develop their own goals and criteria, must show evidence of a product or outcome, and write a report reflecting on what they’ve learned. While the students take ownership over their projects and make all the decisions, their teachers provide guidance and coaching. Their report is assessed by their supervisor and externally moderated by the IB to ensure a globally consistent standard of excellence. 
Using AI-powered voice commands to drive cars
Chase W. ‘27 is envisioning a day when using voice commands to drive our cars is as common as asking Siri to play a song for us. For his project, he figured out how to leverage speech-to-text technology, computer code and AI to send messages that make a car’s motor move forward, backwards, etc. Chase used Chat GPT to create some of the code he needed and learned to use Arduino, an open source electronics platform, to send commands to the motor. Since this was a proof of concept, Chase didn’t build a car, but he did use four working motors.

Chase embraced the challenge and the learning curve and spent entire weekends working on the project. He says finding errors in the code and dealing with wiring issues was time consuming. “I also learned a lot about the little nuances of creating something that hasn’t been made before. It's literally planning every little step. You can't just say, ‘Oh, this talks to this.’ You have to say, ‘Oh, this wire connects to this, which connects to this,’” says Chase.
Back