Not just prompts! How does AI work?

17/01/2025

2 min.

Ital.IA Lab: the experience of Andrea Vaccaro, student at the Carducci School in Comiso

Fondazione Mondo Digitale, in collaboration with Microsoft Italia, is promoting Ital.IA Lab, a project that introduces students and teachers to the potential and challenges ofartificial intelligence (AI). The aim is not just to learn how to formulate prompts, but to understand the mechanisms that regulate this revolutionary technology, stimulating its critical and conscious use.

A concrete example comes from the G. Carducci High School in Comiso (Ragusa), where Andrea Vaccaro, a 16-year-old student, had a unique learning experience thanks to the project. ‘We learnt how AI really works, going beyond its simple use. This helped me interact better with the technology,' Andrea says. The role of professor Andrea Ceschini was also crucial, for his ability to explain complex concepts in a clear and accessible way.
Andrea has been using generative AI tools for two years, but the course allowed him to reflect on less immediate aspects, such as the creative limits of AI: ‘It can generate content, but it is not as creative as a human being. This made me think about how to exploit it more consciously.’
Among the activities carried out, the students created projects with tools such as Bing AI Image and Copilot, narrating the evolution of iconic places over time. Andrea chose Rome, imagining it in three eras:

Ancient Rome, with the newly built Colosseum and the Roman Forum animated by daily life
Modern Rome, with the Spanish Steps and tourists among historical monuments and skyscrapers
Futuristic Rome, a mix of ancient ruins and eco-sustainable innovations.

Andrea dreams of pursuing studies in computer engineering, with a specialisation in AI. The Ital.IA Lab project was not only an educational experience, but a concrete push towards the future.
His suggestion for improvement? Deepen the technological mechanisms: ‘I don't want to limit myself to being just a user, but to understand how AI works deep down. This is what makes a project like Ital.IA Lab really stimulating'.

By Alberta Testa, social media manager

The School

The institute is located in a context characterised by profound and new socio-economic transformations, due on the one hand to the crisis that has affected all sectors of the local economy for more than a decade, and on the other hand to the Covid-19 pandemic emergency that has worsened the economic situation of small entrepreneurs and traders in the area. The presence of the nearby Comiso Airport has failed to significantly affect the economic situation.
The Institute has a population of 1228 students, divided into 64 classes. [...] About 6 per cent of the students are of non-Italian citizenship. In general, they are well integrated in the school context, although some do not have full linguistic-expressive skills and therefore need school intervention with ad hoc language courses. Therefore, the context to which the Institute refers is characterised by a high risk of dispersion and discomfort due to family problems and social and economic disadvantages, deriving from the lack or precariousness of work and the notable presence of foreign communities from the Maghreb area and Eastern Europe. The Institute, attentive to the needs and expectations of the territory, presents itself as an open and inclusive institution that, through a series of actions, is able to synergically involve the entire educating community, to combat school drop-out and educational poverty, promoting the recovery of pro-social skills necessary for educational success at school and in life.
[From the 2022-2025 Three-Year Educational Offer Plan].

Not just prompts! How does AI work?