The Academy of Society & AI
An open education library for Society & AI
Artificial intelligence is already sorting classrooms, workplaces, and public life. It rarely asks first, and it almost never explains itself. The Academy is a free and open place to see how that works, and to make up your own mind about it.
We turn invisible systems into structures you can see, question, and challenge. Our goal is to help you understand quickly, explain plainly, and ask nothing of you but curiosity.
The Academy is Society & AI's teaching arm for minds shaping tomorrow.
Interactive — hover a node to learn more
A knowledge graph of the ideas behind the Academy
What the Academy offers
Play it, read it, teach it, talk about it.
Playing is one way to understand a system. Reading a plain explanation, running a lesson on it, and hearing from people it has already affected are others. The Academy is being built one piece at a time. Here is what you can use today, and what is on the way.
Explainers
Knowledge graphs, timelines, and decision guides that turn a dense topic into something you explore rather than read.
Open the Explainers
Classroom Kits
Unplugged activities, discussion prompts, and a printable PDF a teacher, tutor, or parent can pick up and run tomorrow.
Family Activities
Screen-free things to do with a child, for homes where a spare device is not a given.
PlannedCommunity Voices
First-hand accounts of automated decisions, from students, teachers, and families.
PlannedThe case for the formats
Why we build it this way.
Because a puzzle, an explainer, a classroom activity, and a first-hand account are not different ways of saying the same thing — they are different ways of arriving at it. Each one asks you to do something rather than read about it: commit to an answer, trace a connection, run the thing in a room with other people, sit with what happened to someone who was not asked first. That is how understanding actually arrives.
Much of it is built for young learners first, and all of it is meant to work in a classroom, on a bus, or at a kitchen table. Nothing here is a lesson bolted onto entertainment, and nothing here is finished: more of every format is on the way, for older students and adults as well as children.
Vocabulary is the bottleneck
You cannot argue about something you cannot name. Most people meet automated decisions long before they meet the words for them: proxy, threshold, disparate impact. A word game makes a term stick because you have to hold it in mind and manipulate it; an explainer does it by showing you what the term is attached to. Either way you handle the word rather than read past it.
Close enough is not the same as right
Misinformation and disinformation are not synonyms. Equity is not equality. Matching a term to its exact definition against four plausible near-misses teaches a care that summaries never do — and so does following a definition out to the ideas it borders on.
Reflection beats reflexes
Nothing here runs on a clock, and nothing penalises a second attempt. That changes who can take part: slower readers, cautious thinkers, and anyone for whom a timer means anxiety rather than excitement. Thinking longer is the winning strategy, and that is exactly the habit worth building.
The mechanic is the subject
An algorithm is an order of operations. A classifier is a set of boundaries. A crossword crossing is a constraint that checks another constraint, and a knowledge graph is a set of relations you can walk. These shapes are not a metaphor for the systems we study. They are the same structures, at a scale you can hold in your head.
Anyone can open one
Text, grids, and diagrams run on a decade-old phone, a school Chromebook, and a slow connection. Nothing to install, nothing to log into, no cost, no data collected. Anything that demands a fast device has already excluded part of the class it claims to serve — which is why some of what is coming asks for no device at all.
Short enough to talk about afterwards
Five minutes fits inside a lesson, a car journey, or a staff meeting. The value is rarely in the finishing. It is in the argument that follows, which is why nothing here ends in a score.
Where this is now, and where it goes next.
Today. 3 interactive Explainers turn dense AI-and-education topics into knowledge graphs, timelines, and decision guides you explore rather than read. 5 Mini Games are playable: 3 word games and puzzles for older students and adults, and 2 for ages five to eight. Each one rotates through a bank of hand-written puzzles, and those banks keep growing.
Next. Classroom Kits are being written now — unplugged activities, discussion prompts, and printable material that needs no device in the room. Family Activities and Community Voices follow after those. What is already open keeps growing alongside them: more Explainers, and more games, including a decision game where you set a threshold and live with who it lets through.
How it gets better. We watch how people actually use what is here, then revise. If something is confusing, broken, too easy, or simply wrong about something, telling us is the fastest way to shape what gets built next.
- Always free
- No ads, no tracking
- No account needed
- Runs in any browser
Nothing here tests you, ranks you, or keeps a record. The only thing stored is a note in your own browser about which puzzles you have already seen, so the next one is different.
The Academy is designed, conceived, and developed by Sai Gattupalli, Ph.D., Principal Research Scientist of the Society & AI Research Group, as an exercise in scientific and social responsibility toward the communities this work is meant to serve.