Machine Learning for Kids was unavailable for most of 29th May 2018. I wanted to share what happened and what I’m doing about it.
Archive for May, 2018
Machine Learning for Kids outage report
Wednesday, May 30th, 2018Noughts and Crosses AI demo for Science Fair events
Monday, May 28th, 2018A hands-on demo for use at a small STEM event – letting kids train a simple AI system by playing a few games of noughts and crosses.
I prepared an activity for a STEM event in London this week. The idea was to make something for a Science Fair sort of event – where children will be walking past a stand, and might stop for a minute or two to try out an activity.
The objective was to come up with a hands-on demo that would enable a volunteer to talk to the children about machine learning.
As I’ve written it, I thought I’d share it here in case anyone else might find it useful for another event.
It’s based on the noughts-and-crosses activity that I’ve used before. Kids play noughts-and-crosses against a simple artificial intelligence system. The computer uses a machine learning model to decide where to make it’s moves. And that machine learning model will be trained throughout the event using the moves from every game so far.
Teaching artificial intelligence using Scratch
Friday, May 18th, 2018This is a recording of a talk I did at DevoxxUK last week. Devoxx is a community developer event, run in London. I had 50 minutes to talk about what I’m doing with Machine Learning for Kids.
Groups like Code Club, CoderDojo, Code.org and many others are doing amazing work in helping to introduce kids to coding. Initiatives like Hour of Code have highlighted how those of us in tech can help to support and inspire the next generation of developers.
How can we extend this to include artificial intelligence and machine learning?
How can we use the cloud-based machine learning APIs that are increasingly available to us as developers to extend the tools used to teach kids about coding?
In this session, I’ll share the work I’ve been doing to introduce machine learning to kids, and demo the resources that are available to give kids hands-on experiences at training and using machine learning models for themselves.
If you’re familiar with AI and ML technologies, this session will hopefully enable you to share your expertise with local schools, colleges and coding groups.
If you’re not as familiar with ML, this session will show you how quick and simple cloud-based machine learning APIs are today, and perhaps inspire you to use them in your next project.
Scratch Day at IBM Hursley
Friday, May 18th, 2018Scratch is a visual programming language and drag-and-drop coding platform for children.
Scratch Day is an annual world-wide network of events where kids come together to make things in Scratch.
Their logo sums it up beautifully:
Kids of different ages come together and meet each other. They share their experiences of coding – finding out the differences between what they each learn about coding in their different schools.
They try and make something. It’s basically a hack day for kids – where the kids are encouraged to use Scratch to make their hacks.
Most importantly, they share their experiences. They talk about the things they tried, the challenges they faced, and the things they learned along the way. And they demo the things that worked.
On May 12th that happened around the world, in close to a thousand venues, big and small.
One of them was IBM Hursley. We invited local families to the lab to take part in a small local Scratch Day.