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STEM
Teaching Today Wisconsin | Summer / Back-to-School 2026 Page 11

At MPS STEAM Fair, 750-plus Students’ Experiments and Engineering

Rule the Day

Milwaukee Public Schools The result: ChatGPT, the most used
The inspiration for tomorrow’s scientists model, had the largest overconfidence gap
and engineers might be lurking in plain sight at — that is, very confident in its answers even
home, or it might come from a simple remark when the answers were incorrect. Claude had
that piqued the interest of a curious mind. the smallest overconfidence gap and also had
It’s all fair game for the young creators the highest accuracy rate.
of the hundreds of projects at the annual Mil- Reel correctly hypothesized that
waukee Public Schools STEAM Fair, which ChatGPT would have the most errors (because
this year drew more than 750 students from it is the most used). Reel also hypothesized
50-plus schools. that the subjects with the most errors would be
Reel Osman, who is in the 7th grade at logic and math because of the wording and dif-
IDEAL School, heard a teacher warn against ficulty, but the most error-prone subject for AI
using AI for research projects because it can be turned out to be history. “I think this is because
unreliable. Reel observed that artificial intel- of historical debate,” she said.
ligence will supply incorrect answers but do it The STEAM Fair was a great experi-
with great confidence. ence for Reel, who participated last year in the
The result: her project, “AI: Confidence vs. engineering division. (Her brother, Abubakr,
Accuracy,” which won 1st place in the grades 6 a freshman at Reagan College Preparatory
to 8 science division at the fair, held May 21. High School, also won first place this year, in
the high school engineering division. For his
Testing Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini project, “Talking Hands,” he programmed a
Reel wanted to test AI’s accuracy and its robotic hand and arm to sign the alphabet.)
confidence in its answers, so she tested three “I wanted to raise more awareness” about career opportunities — ”something that can develop a mechanism that would allow them
models — Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini — AI and have her project serve as a precau- really test my brain.” to open doors that have trickier-to-operate
across five areas: history, English language tion, particularly as various cheating scandals A Mechanism for Cats and Doors knobs (instead of the easier levers).
arts, math, science, and logic. involving AI surface, Reel said. Olof made multiple prototypes, and the
She asked each model the same series She’s hoping to participate in the STEAM Olof Knox, a 7th-grader at Golda Meir first two worked, to an extent. “I learned that
of 250 questions across the five subjects and Fair again next year. Ultimately, her dream is School’s upper campus, noticed his two cats opening doorknobs is actually something that
asked each model to score how confident it to become a radiologist, but she said, “I’m “trying to wiggle open doorknobs but just
was in each answer, on a scale of 0 to 100. really drawn to math” and is open to other failing,” he said. He wondered if he could Continued on Page 12