dale lane

I tried introducing my two kids to machine learning by helping them make a game this week.

In this post, I’ll try and explain why, how we did it, and how it went. And if you make it all the way to an end, I’ve got some videos and a link to a demo to show you what we made.

Why

I think we need to introduce the basic concept of machine learning to children.

I think the current approach to introducing coding using things like Scratch aren’t enough. This isn’t to say Scratch isn’t great (I’ve been running a Code Club every week for the last couple of years, delivered almost entirely using Scratch, so I’d be the last person to say it isn’t a fantastic tool). It lets you snap together blocks representing actions to teach the programming mindset of getting a computer to do something by you breaking the task down into a series of steps.

I think we need to add to this with something that introduces the model of machine learning – getting a computer to do something by training it with examples of doing that task.

I’ve been saying this for a while – I gave a talk about it at an education conference last year, I’ve written about it here before, and it was the theme of a lecture I gave at a science society in London last month.

This week is half-term and I have the week off work, so I thought I’d finally spend a bit of time trying it out by experimenting on my own two daughters (Faith and Grace, who are aged 7 and 11).

In Code Club, I mostly try to introduce programming concepts by helping the kids to create games. Sticking with what seems to work, I’ve helped them to make a game by training an ML system how to play it.

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