I’ve started adding pretrained machine learning models to Machine Learning for Kids. In this post, I wanted to describe what I’m doing.
Pretrained models in Machine Learning for Kids
May 25th, 2020
#SwitchGameADay
May 23rd, 2020For a while now, I’ve been playing a different Nintendo Switch game every day, sharing a video clip on Twitter.
In this post I’ll collect together all of the clips, and the answers to the questions I’ve been asked along the way.
I’m going to play and share a different Switch game every day…. until I lose interest or run out of new Switch games to play
Unfortunately the Twitter client on the Switch doesn’t do threads, so I’ll go old-skool and use #SwitchGameADay to group them.— Dale Lane (@dalelane) March 15, 2020
Using repl.it with Machine Learning for Kids
May 10th, 2020Students can work on machine learning projects in Python entirely in the browser, without any need for setup, installs, or registration.
Bringing AI into the classroom
February 28th, 2020IBM and mindSpark are running a series of free webinars for teachers about artificial intelligence.
This evening’s 90 minute webinar was about bringing AI into the classroom, and I helped contribute some of the content.
The session was very interactive, but there were some pre-prepared presentations in there.
I’ve got a recording of one of the segments below, in which I shared some of my experiences of introducing AI and machine learning in schools, and what I’ve found works well.
Why are Kafka messages still on the topic after the retention time has expired?
February 9th, 2020We had an interesting Kafka question from an Event Streams user. The answer isn’t immediately obvious unless you know a bit about Kafka internals, and after a little searching I couldn’t find an explanation online, so I thought I’d share the answer here (obviously anonymised and heavily simplified).
What is retention?
Retention is a Kafka feature to help you manage the amount of disk space your topics use.
It lets you specify how long you want Kafka to keep messages on a topic for. You can specify this by time (e.g. “I want messages on this topic to be preserved for at least X days”) or by disk usage (e.g. “I want at least the last X gb of messages on this topic to be preserved”).
After the retention time or disk threshold is exceeded, messages become eligible for being automatically deleted by Kafka.
What was wrong in this case?
They had created a topic with a retention time of 7 days.
They had assumed that this meant messages older than 7 days would be deleted.
When they looked at the messages on their topic, they could see some messages older than 7 days were there, and were surprised.
They thought this might mean retention wasn’t working.
A run-through of IBM Event Streams
January 16th, 2020I needed to quickly record a demo of what it looks like to get started with Event Streams yesterday.
It’s a little rough around the edges (it was only for an internal event, so the production values were essentially me-talking-at-my-laptop without a lot of planning or editing) but I thought I’d share it here in case I need to point anyone else at it.
Geo-spatial data in Scratch
November 13th, 2019In this post, I want to share a random thing I made in Scratch this week, and ask for suggestions of what I could do with it.
I get a lot of emails from teachers and coding groups asking for help with Scratch projects. They’re normally small or specific questions – asking for help figuring out a bug in a Scratch project or how to get something working.
But this week I got a more challenging email. It asked for a way to show a map in Scratch, and use a Scratch script to plot points on the map, given coordinates in latitude and longitude.
I agreed to give it a try. (Details for how to access it below.)
The Artificial Intelligence Grand Challenge
November 4th, 2019The first of the Grand Challenges identified in the Government’s Industrial Strategy is about Artificial Intelligence. One of the things that these challenges highlight is the UK’s need for skills in these key areas.
To that end, STEM Learning and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy have created the “Grand Challenges – Our Futures” programme to improve young people’s knowledge of the STEM skills identified in the Government’s Industrial Strategy Grand Challenges.
Last week, STEM Learning announced a set of new free resources to support teaching in these key areas.
The Artificial Intelligence resources include three different packages aimed at students of different ages.