When the grant results go up on the wall at their East London youth centre, one thing is clear: projects from Riverside always seem to win...and Eastside always seems to lose. Thirteen-year-old Amira and her friends Jay, Tomas and Asha can't prove it's unfair-but the pattern won't leave them alone.
When they discover the charity is using a new "AI scoring tool" to judge applications, the four friends turn into Bias Detectives. With laptops, notebooks and a wall full of sticky notes, they dive into old reports, build their own mini-models, and interview real applicants. What they find is bigger than one lost grant: a computer quietly learning to repeat years of unfair decisions.
Now the team has to do more than complain. They must design a fairer system, write an AI Builders Code, and convince a room full of adults that young people deserve a say in how technology judges their lives.
Perfect for readers aged 10-13, The Bias Detectives: How We Caught the Computer Being Unfair is a fast-paced, illustrated story about friendship, data, and standing up for your community. Blending mystery, STEM and social justice, it shows that you don't need to be a genius coder to ask powerful questions-or to help build AI that treats people fairly.