Our newest AI Quest: Mapping the human brain

Google has released "Polar Peaks," the third installment in its AI Quests series, an interactive learning game developed by Google Research with the Stanford Accelerator for Learning. In a post dated October 26, 2026, Ronit Levavi Morad, a senior director at Google Research, says the series casts students ages 11 to 14 as Google researchers working on major global problems. According to Google, players have completed more than 400,000 quests so far, and the program is available in 10 languages.

The new quest centers on neuroscience. Guided by in-game mentors, students scan and map neurons to investigate a character's memory loss, doing tasks such as cleaning data and testing models. Google says the point is to show that AI depends on careful human oversight and critical thinking. The game draws on more than ten years of the company's connectomics research, and at the end students hear from two researchers involved in that work, which includes a recent map of the complete fruit fly brain that Google describes as the largest by neuron count to date. The two earlier quests covered flood forecasting and detecting eye disease.

Google is also adding teacher training modules to its Google AI Educator Series to help educators fit the quests into their lessons and reinforce AI literacy concepts. Modules for the first two quests are available now, with the Polar Peaks module due the following month. The company notes that AI Quests won a 2026 Webby Award in AI education and a top K–12 honor at the ETIH Innovation Awards, and it plans to expand into more classrooms this school year.