Student Innovation Brings AI to Crescent Enrolment

What began as a classroom introduction to artificial intelligence has become a practical tool for prospective Crescent families, thanks to the ingenuity and persistence of two Upper School students, Conan Yi ’27 and Kevin Sun ’27.

The boys first encountered chatbot technology in the Launching and Leading a Business course. Intrigued by its potential, they began researching how to create an AI assistant for students. Their original vision was ambitious: a chatbot that could access individual schedules, courses, and other school information.

But after consulting with teachers and Crescent’s IT team, they encountered a significant obstacle: student privacy. “We had a working prototype,” says Yi. “So when they said no to us, we asked ourselves, 'Is there any way around this?'” Rather than abandoning the project, they reconsidered its purpose and discovered another opportunity. They learned that Crescent’s Enrolment Office regularly fields questions from prospective families, some of whom find navigating the School’s website challenging. Their chatbot could make that information easier to access. “Just from this process, I learned how to identify the right stakeholders that I need to speak to when I have a product,” says Sun.

Unlike Google, which searches across the internet and can sometimes return information about other schools or overlook content buried in PDFs, Crescent’s chatbot draws from a curated database of School-specific information. Using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technology, it identifies relevant information and provides direct answers to users’ questions, reducing the risk of inaccurate or fabricated responses. It also cites its sources, allowing prospective families to verify information and easily navigate to the relevant pages on Crescent’s website. 

The process involved countless iterations, technical challenges, and collaboration with faculty and staff. “It was a grind that we just had to go through," says Yi. Along the way, the boys learned as much about adaptability, communication, and problem-solving as they did about technology.  

Now live on the How to Apply pages of Crescent’s website, the chatbot continues to evolve, and the boys hope to introduce voice functionality and other improvements as AI advances.