We Put in the Work: The Byrd Brains on Solving Homelessness with AI
Season 3, Episode 35 of Kinwise Conversations · Hit play or read the transcript
We Put in the Work: The Byrd Brains on Solving Homelessness with AI
Episode Summary
What does it look like when a student builds a solution to a problem he has lived? In this third episode of Kinwise's special series on the NC AI Solve-a-Thon, host Lydia Kumar sits down with three members of the Byrd Brains: Tremaine Thomas, Demarcus Billups, and Christopher Butler, and their coach Stefany VanScyoc, AI instructor at Douglas Byrd High School in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Together with teammate Camille Singleton, they built the Jade Book: an app and website designed to help unhoused and low-income residents in Cumberland County find critical resources. Chris Butler has experienced homelessness three times, including during COVID while sleeping in a car. He said the Jade Book would have helped his family. This conversation is about what becomes possible when students are trusted with real problems, and what happens when one of those students has lived the problem himself.
Key Takeaways for Superintendents, K-12 Leaders & Mission-Driven Educators
Lived experience is a design asset. Chris's personal history with homelessness didn't just motivate the project. It shaped every feature decision the team made, from which resources to include to why the app needed to work across the entire country, not just Fayetteville.
AI hallucination is a real production problem students can learn to solve. The team discovered their app was generating fake shelter listings and built a systematic back-testing process to verify every resource. That's not a school skill. That's a professional one.
Cross-school, remote collaboration is a real-world skill. Chris attends a different school than his teammates and joined through SparkNC. The team met in person for the first time only after making the top ten finalists. They built something real together before they ever sat in the same room.
Schools need AI instructors, not just AI policies. Tremaine made this point directly: Stefany VanScyoc is the only AI instructor at his school, and that access made all the difference. Teachers who model thoughtful AI use create entirely different learning environments than teachers who ban it.
Real problems unlock real capability. Companies and organizations have already approached the team about making the Jade Book a real product. As Stefany put it: this is their project. She was just there to support them.
Where Did the Idea Come From?
Lydia: Can one of you take us through what your app is, what it's called, and what problem it solves?
Demarcus: Our app is called the Jade Book. Essentially, it helps homeless people get access to resources near them and shows them what they can access. Let's say I'm a homeless person without shelter: the app takes me through a needs assessment and then assigns shelters near them based on a zip code database we built into the app.
Lydia: How did you decide on this problem? There are so many problems in the world you could have solved. Why this one?
Demarcus: We live in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and around this area there are a lot of unhoused people. We thought about that and wanted to use it as our idea to build the Jade Book as a way to help them get the resources they need.
Chris: And also, I myself was a victim of homelessness three separate times. So this resource would have also been pretty useful when I was younger.
Lydia: Chris, from your perspective, was it hard to find resources? How did people answer the questions your app now answers?
Chris: When I was younger, I didn't really understand the concept of homelessness because I was little. But most of my homeless experience was during COVID, when we were on lockdown. We were sleeping out of our car. I put together a bunch of resources. I found a list of nearby shelters and we integrated those into the Jade Book. If this had existed, I feel like it could have helped.
"I was a victim of homelessness three separate times. This resource would have also been pretty useful when I was younger." — Christopher Butler, 10th grade, Pine Forest High School
Building the Jade Book
Lydia: How did you develop the software? What was your process for creating it?
Demarcus: We used a tool called Lovable.dev, which is an AI-assisted coding tool. You put your ideas in as inputs and it basically brings them to life. I'm not a strong coder, so a tool that uses AI — where I can put in an input and bring my ideas to life — was really helpful. It made the Jade Book possible.
Lydia: Were you using other types of AI beyond building the app itself?
Demarcus: Yes. I would go on ChatGPT and ask how to fix errors — like when the site would sometimes crash — or I'd tell it about the app and ask what other features I could implement. It would give me helpful feedback.
Chris: I used AI for external research. I used You.com, which is an AI search engine. I don't like ChatGPT because it doesn't tell you where it got the information from — unlike You.com. So I searched things like where homelessness is most common and statistics related to homelessness, and it gave me everything we needed with citations. I added that to our research document and we worked from there.
Lydia: So you were collecting research and citing original sources. You were being really selective and thoughtful about your process.
Chris: Yes. If you're going to use AI, at least know where the information came from.
Demarcus: Camille also used Adobe Firefly for image generation for our presentation.
The Hardest Part: AI Hallucination at Scale
Lydia: What was the most challenging part of building your solution?
Demarcus: One of the biggest challenges was AI itself. AI tends to hallucinate. Rather than giving real resources, it would make up shelters that weren't real. We'd search them and they just didn't exist. So we had to back-test over and over again until real resources started showing up.
Lydia: How do you check for hallucinations at that scale? If you're checking Fayetteville shelters, okay, but then North Carolina, then nationwide?
Demarcus: I would go to ChatGPT and ask it to generate a strong prompt that I could give to Lovable.dev to go through each of its files and verify whether resources were actually valid or not. And then we did random checks too, like, is this homeless shelter in Nebraska real?
Chris: One challenge for me was distance. I go to a different school, Pine Forest, so I was on Google Meet while everyone else was in their media center. That created technology issues. But we were able to adapt.
Tremaine: There were also a lot of ideas, figuring out which ones to implement and which ones to leave out. Too many features and the app starts to crash.
Lydia: Were there features you had to cut that were heartbreaking to let go?
Chris: We wanted multiple languages. We had French, Chinese, Arabic. But they didn't translate fully, so we had to cut them all and stick with English and Spanish. We might add more in the future.
Collaboration Across Two Schools
Lydia: How did you connect on this project when you weren't in the same place?
Chris: I'm part of SparkNC, which is a high-tech accelerator program with competency-based learning where you can earn credit. I told our Cumberland County SparkNC leader I was interested in the Presidential AI Challenge, and she connected me with Ms. VanScyoc and the Byrd Brains. That's when I met them.
Lydia: Did you meet in person before the Solve-a-Thon?
Chris: The first time was at the Educational Resource Center after we made the top ten. That's when I met them in person. The second time was in Greensboro for the final competition.
Lydia: So many people do remote work professionally, but students rarely get to collaborate this way on a project. That's a real-world skill you practiced.
What AI Should Actually Look Like in Schools
Lydia: A lot of educators are very concerned about students using AI to replace their thinking. But you used AI to solve a problem that affects millions of people. What's your perspective on how AI can and should be used in schools?
Tremaine: Personally, I have kind of a bad perspective on AI's normal uses. I feel like it really drains creativity. But seeing it used in a helpful way — in a good environment, to actually help people — it's pretty inspiring.
Chris: I have a pretty neutral view. I actually want to be an elementary school teacher. I'm not going to tell students not to use AI. They're just using it for the wrong reasons. In my classroom, I would actually encourage them to use AI to help them understand things better. But instead, students choose to use it to do their work for them.
Lydia: What would an ethical AI assignment look like in your classroom?
Chris: Let's say I was teaching basic addition. I would have students write their own problem, put it into AI, have it solve it, and then see if they could spot any errors or incorrect answers. So the student understands how to solve it themselves — but also learns to spot bias or errors in AI. That critical thinking is the skill they need. And especially in elementary school, because young students are the most vulnerable to believing everything. That's why it's important to teach them early.
Tremaine: Schools should allot time — maybe once a week — for groups of students to go to the media center and work on finding ways to help their community using AI or technology. Like mini Solve-a-Thons.
Tremaine: And I wanted to say: in my school, Ms. VanScyoc is the only AI instructor. We need more AI instructors in schools across the world.
Lydia: What does an AI instructor do that a regular teacher doesn't?
Tremaine: Regular teachers sometimes just use AI to make a ten-question quiz, or they tell you not to use it at all. An AI instructor encourages you to use it and actually teaches you about it.
"Seeing AI used in a helpful way — in a good environment, to actually help people — it's pretty inspiring." — Demarcus Billups, 12th grade, Douglas Byrd High School
What's Next for the Jade Book
Lydia: What do you hope happens next with the Jade Book?
Demarcus: We hope to expand it, get more marketing on it, and have it be used throughout the United States — starting locally and expanding from there.
Lydia: What would be most helpful if someone listening wants to support you?
Demarcus: Money would be one of the biggest helps — there are fees to publish apps and websites so people can use them publicly. The other thing is marketing. The biggest thing is that people need to know about the website. If people can help spread it, that would help a lot.
Chris: For me, it would be getting the word out. I'm actually working with my school social worker — she liked the idea when I showed it to her and is going to help me talk to principals about offering it as a student resource at my school. It would be valuable for students and families experiencing homelessness.
If you want to support the Byrd Brains — whether through funding, marketing, or guidance on publishing to the App Store and Google Play — reach out to Lydia at kinwise.ai and she'll connect you with Stefany VanScyoc.
What This Experience Revealed About Students
Lydia: When you think about identifying a real problem and building an AI solution — what did it teach you about what students your age are capable of?
Stefany VanScyoc: I'm so proud of them. They were able to achieve something that people really, really want to utilize. We've been approached by so many different people and companies who have said: this needs to be a real thing, how can we make it happen? And they did that. I was just here to support them and guide them along the way. This is their project. I've been so impressed, and I know they will do great things.
Tremaine: I think more students should be using AI to solve real-world problems the way we did. People my age — we have really good ideas that just need to be put out into the world. And they can actually make a change.
Stefany VanScyoc: I've been a teacher for about fifteen years, and kids have such a different perspective on the world that needs to be considered when thinking about new ideas. They're the ones who are going to be experiencing the future and shaping it. We need to listen to them.
Chris: And remember — unhoused people are people too. We should be helping them, not being rude. You don't know how someone ended up on the streets. That's why we built this.
"They have really good ideas that just need to be put out into the world. And they can actually make a change." — Tremaine Thomas, 12th grade, Douglas Byrd High School
Guest Bios
Stefany VanScyoc is the Media Coordinator and AI instructor at Douglas Byrd High School in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where she has worked for three years. With fifteen years of teaching experience, she is the only AI instructors in her district and a passionate advocate for showing students how technology can be a tool for good. She coached the Byrd Brains through the entire NC AI Solve-a-Thon process.
Tremaine Thomas is a senior at Douglas Byrd High School in Cumberland County. He enjoys video games and came to the Solve-a-Thon after competing in the Presidential AI Challenge, wanting to get more feedback from real judges in a live setting. He is also a member of the school's robotics team, which advanced to the state competition.
Demarcus Billups is a senior at Douglas Byrd High School in Cumberland County who loves anything technology-related. He led much of the app development using Lovable.dev and became the team's expert in using AI to troubleshoot performance issues and verify resource accuracy.
Christopher Butler is a sophomore at Pine Forest High School in Cumberland County. He joined the Byrd Brains through SparkNC after seeking out a team to work with on the Presidential AI Challenge. Chris is passionate about fixing the education system, hopes to become an elementary school teacher, and has experienced homelessness three times, experiences that directly shaped the Jade Book.
Camille Singleton is an 11th grader at Douglas Byrd High School. She is a member of both the robotics team and the softball team, and handled image generation for the team's presentation using Adobe Firefly. Camille was unable to join the recording but is a full member of the Byrd Brains team.
Resources Mentioned & Related Concepts
The Jade Book: App and website built by the Byrd Brains to help unhoused and low-income residents in Cumberland County find critical resources including shelters, free showers, laundromats, and food.
Lovable.dev: AI-assisted coding tool the team used to build the Jade Book. Users input ideas and the platform helps bring them to life in code, particularly useful for students without extensive coding backgrounds
SparkNC: North Carolina's statewide competency-based student innovation program; how Chris connected with the Byrd Brains team across schools
Adobe Firefly: AI image generation tool used by Camille Singleton for the team's competition presentation
United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: 17 global goals the UN aims to achieve by 2030; Chris references these often when thinking about problems worth solving. Goal 4, Quality Education, is what sparked his passion for teaching. You can follow Chris's work on Instagram at @magister_butler
Douglas Byrd Robotics on Instagram: Follow Tremaine's robotics team, which advanced to the NC state competition @Ironbyrds
NC AI Solve-a-Thon Series: All five episodes at kinwise.ai/nc-ai-solve-a-thon
