Eighth grader builds IBM Watson-powered AI chatbot for students making college plans

While her peers reveled in an unprecedented virtual school year, the self-described "technology enthusiast," Harita Suresh, 13, was bored. She decided on an online course and settled on IBM Skills Network's "AI chatbots without programming." She lacked experience with artificial intelligence, but was eager to learn through the self-paced course. Harita is more than a little familiar with tech, "I have been interested in technology since I was 5," she said. "My first coding challenge was the Lightbot Hour of Code. I was fascinated that the code I wrote could control the actions of the characters on screen. Since then, I pursued coding on multiple platforms like code.org, The more I learned about tech, the more I wanted to know. In fifth grade, I took a Python programming course offered by Georgia Tech."