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AI & Innovation Club: A Student-Run Club Teaching Hands-On AI Building

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A club I founded at Fleetwood Park Secondary to teach students how to build real things with AI, including no-code websites, automations, chatbots, and prompt engineering, by building something every meeting.

Role: Founder & President · Timeline: September 2025 – present · Stack/Tools: Lovable, Bolt, n8n, Make.com, Chatbase, ChatGPT

  • 20 active members across ~13 bi-weekly, build-focused meetings since founding in September 2025.
  • 22 students produced AI videos for the Best Buy Teen Tech Network "Create with AI" Challenge (with Microsoft), competing against 40+ schools across Canada.
  • Every meeting teaches a real build tool, from Lovable and Bolt to n8n, Make.com and Chatbase, with members shipping working sites and automations rather than sitting through slides.

The Problem

Students at the school had access to powerful AI tools and no idea how to use them to build anything. What learning existed happened by watching, through videos and slideshows, not by making. There was nowhere a regular student could go and leave having built a working website, automation, or chatbot. The skill sat with a few people and wasn't spreading.

My Role

Built and owned the club's founding, the curriculum, and the instruction at every meeting, teaching no-code website builders, automation tools, chatbots, and prompt engineering. I also ran the school's Best Buy challenge entry as an open internal contest. Supporting contributions: Ms. Stusiak as faculty sponsor, and 22 participating students who produced the competition video submissions.

Key Decisions

Building every meeting instead of lecturing. The challenge: making students actually capable, not just informed, since most tech clubs default to slideshows that produce knowledge nobody uses. Options considered: lecture and slideshow meetings (rejected, because that knowledge doesn't stick or turn into skill); guest-speaker sessions (rejected, because they're one-off and build no hands-on skill). What was chosen: every meeting is hands-on, where members build a real thing with a real tool. The tradeoff is more prep and live troubleshooting, in exchange for members who can actually make things by the end.

No-code tools over teaching programming. The challenge: making AI building open to any student, whether or not they can code. Options considered: teach programming first (rejected, because it's too high a barrier and most students would quit before building anything). What was chosen: no-code and low-code tools, namely Lovable, Bolt, Make.com, n8n and Chatbase, so a beginner can ship a working product inside one meeting. The tradeoff is less low-level technical depth for far broader participation and real shipped output.

Running the Best Buy entry as an open contest. The challenge: Best Buy allows only one submission per school, and hand-picking a small team would shut most members out of a national opportunity. Options considered: pick a small representative team (rejected, because it excludes most members and means less participation); skip the challenge (rejected, because it throws away a national-scale opportunity). What was chosen: open it to everyone as an internal contest, then submit the winning video as the school's official entry. The tradeoff was more to coordinate, in exchange for 22 students actually producing something instead of a handful.

The Solution

The club runs on a recurring build loop: ~13 bi-weekly meetings, each teaching a specific tool. Lovable and Bolt for no-code sites, n8n and Make.com for automations, Chatbase for chatbots, and ChatGPT for prompt engineering. Members leave having built something that works. (See: member group photo.)

For the Best Buy Teen Tech Network "Create with AI" Challenge, an internal school contest got 22 students producing AI-enhanced videos with Microsoft Copilot, Designer, and Clipchamp; the winning entry became the school's single national submission. (See: Best Buy registration, submission, and result messages.)

Results & Impact

20 active members; ~13 bi-weekly meetings since September 2025. For the Best Buy challenge, 22 students produced AI videos and the school competed against 40+ schools across Canada. The submission was a full national-competition entry, an artist statement, a storyboard and a 1 to 4.5 minute AI-enhanced video, built and shipped by students who mostly would not have started otherwise.

What I Learned

  • Lowering the barrier does more than raising the ceiling. No-code tools got students building who never would have started with code.
  • A skill only matters if it spreads. The point was never to be the one person who could build with AI, but to make that normal for everyone around me.

What Came Next

The club started after FleetBot showed how few students knew how to use these tools, and it became the launchpad for the Surrey Youth AI Summit: ~70 students from 14 schools. (Both FleetBots and the Summit were separate personal builds, not club group projects. The club is where those skills get taught and passed on.)