Central High students explore AI through art, ethics, history and hands-on building

About 25 students from Omaha Central High School, part of Omaha Public Schools, visited an artificial intelligence exhibition at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) on Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2026. The visit ran from about 8:30 to 9:30 A.M.

The exhibition is hosted by UNO's Artificial Intelligence Center for Collaborative Outreach, Research, and Education (AI-CCORE). Vishva Prasanth Srinivasan, an AI innovation engineer at AI-CCORE, led the session. He first walked the group through each section, explaining what its systems were designed to show, how they work, and the larger question each one raises.

After the guided explanation, the students had time to explore and use the experiences themselves. During the open exploration period, students clustered around AI + Art, a humanoid robot near the AI Agent Maker Arena, and the Proto display.

Each system in the exhibition makes something easier: turning a sketch into an image, asking a robot about AI history, viewing one moral problem from three angles, or building an agent without writing code. None decides what a result means, whether it works, how it should be used, or which values should govern it. Those decisions stay with people.

Where the drawing ends and the model begins

Srinivasan said AI + Art is designed to examine both the useful and the limited roles of AI in creative work, including where AI does not help. He argued that artists are especially well positioned to evaluate and communicate AI-generated imagery because of their long-developed attention to visual detail.

According to the exhibit documentation, the section's Sketch to Art kiosk captures a visitor's freehand touchscreen drawing in machine-readable vector form and analyzes features such as shape, contours, and geometry. The visitor chooses a style, and those choices and other conditions steer a generative process. The documentation names Stable Diffusion and iterative denoising, in which an image emerges from noise through repeated refinement.

Generating an image is not the same as judging it. The visitor supplies the idea, the drawing, the visual direction, and the final call on whether the result works. The system supplies transformation and learned visual patterns, and it may add details the visitor never drew.

Artist's Lens takes the problem further, turning a webcam photo into a stylized portrait or a comic-style story across several panels. Keeping the person recognizable from frame to frame is harder, and a person still decides whether the sequence works.

A longer history, then a harder question

The exhibition's AI Timeline, "The Chronicles of Artificial Intelligence," places today's generative systems inside more than 70 years of AI development, through curated milestones that include the Turing Test, Deep Blue, and ChatGPT. Srinivasan put its premise simply: "AI is not something new and fresh."

The timeline also explains AI winters, stretches when expectations outran what computing, algorithms, or data could deliver. Enthusiasm and funding cooled, research continued, and momentum returned as methods, computing, or data improved.

Two Misty robots, Pioneer and Nova, answer visitors' questions about earlier and more recent AI history, roughly before and after 2000. According to the exhibit documentation, each robot coordinates sensing, speech capture, language-model responses, text-to-speech, and network communication. What looks like one conversational machine is a system of parts.

AI + Ethics turns from what AI can do to whether it should be used that way. Its topics include AI and Relationships as well as AI and the Environment, and three philosopher-inspired AI personas bring different moral frameworks to the same problem.

Bentham-Bot, drawing on Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian tradition, weighs consequences and overall welfare. Korsgaard-Bot draws on the work of philosopher Christine Korsgaard and Kantian approaches to duties, principles, agency, and how persons should be treated. Aquinas-Bot draws on traditions connected with Thomas Aquinas, including virtue, purpose, human flourishing, natural law, responsibility, and the common good.

The personas are not there to give visitors the correct moral answer. They are designed to expose different ways of reasoning about a hard question. Decision kiosks make the question concrete, asking visitors to respond to specific situations where values such as privacy, safety, and fairness can conflict.

Building the system and reaching past the room

The Maker Arena itself moves visitors from questioning AI to building with it. Participants assemble AI workflows or agents in a visual drag-and-drop environment. The exhibit documentation references Langflow, a tool in which each component is one step in a flow.

Dragging components instead of writing code lowers the barrier to entry without removing the reasoning. A builder still decides what problem the system solves, what information it receives, and where a person needs to review the result.

The documented workflow shows the larger structure: participants register, get access to a station, build an agent, submit the flow for review, and see a leaderboard update. The language model is one component inside that larger engineered system.

The students were also introduced to Proto, a full-scale spatial display for human-scale presentations and large-format visualizations. Its current content features UNO Chancellor Joanne Li, Ph.D., CFA.

The group also saw a large anatomical heart visualization created for the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC).

Proto connects to a broader effort: the Nebraska AI Literacy and Workforce Infrastructure Initiative (NA’WI), a three-year statewide program led by AI-CCORE and funded by Nebraska's Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). NA’WI plans to reach up to 450 participants through 12 engagement hubs across Nebraska, so that people outside Omaha can learn about AI closer to home.

The exhibition reflects AI-CCORE's aim of making AI something people can understand, build, test, and apply responsibly. Across art, history, ethics, system building, and visualization, it sets what AI can do beside the human decisions that still surround it.