How “Lovable”!

New AI Club in Maclay’s Upper School

Photo by Aerps.com on Unsplash

As of the second semester in the 2025-26 school year, Maclay has introduced a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) club into the upper school. An interest meeting for this club was held in Langford Hall on Jan. 12, 2026, where students were briefed on what the club would entail and the club’s purpose. The club sponsor is Shannon McWilliams, a new member of the Maclay community. McWilliams was introduced as an AI expert, who, using AI for coding, created his own app. He has worked with technology and AI throughout his career. 

McWilliams’ ultimate goal for this club is to understand and be able to fully harness AI tools. McWilliams divided the final semester into six phases, with each phase typically lasting two to three weeks. The first phase, from the first to third weeks of the semester, will be used to build AI foundations and boost understanding of the ethical side of AI. The second phase, lasting two weeks, will be brainstorming for an end of semester project. The third and fourth phases will be used to develop each student’s projects, and the final two phases will be finalizing project preparations and presenting their project.

“[I] really just [want] to bring this group of students along in their knowledge about AI and do something tangible with it,” McWilliams said. “So it’s not just academic learning, but actually putting our hands on some AI tools to build something.”

The AI model this club will be focused on utilizing is Lovable AI, a model that allows people to create web apps without any coding experience. Notably, the club website is also created using Lovable, and it contains the club syllabus as well as a detailed, week-by-week schedule. 

This club also serves as preparation for encounters with AI in day-to-day life. Noting the increased usage of AI in social media, the workforce and learning institutions, McWilliams hopes to familiarize students with it, teach them to innovate with it and allow them to use it to their full advantage. 

“I would like to learn how to use AI for other stuff than just school subjects,” sophomore Dawson Dean said.

A goal of this club is to help students understand the ethical side of AI, such as when to use it. This is helpful to students, because on a global scale, AI has caused concern for its environmental effects and ability to displace jobs. Concern has grown for AI’s ability to replace jobs, such as artists, software developers and writers, because various AI models are able to generate pictures, videos, code, articles, essays, emails and novels. Most data centers that contain AI servers consume mass amounts of water and electricity, which depletes water supplies throughout the world and increases greenhouse gases, spurring climate change even more. 

“I think it will get solved,” McWilliams said. “I think in the end we will have cleaner energy driving data centers than we have today.”