Archive for April, 2021

Win a copy of my “Machine Learning for Kids” book

Saturday, April 24th, 2021

I’m running a competition to win a copy of my book, “Machine Learning for Kids”.

I mentioned a few months ago that I’ve written a book: “Machine Learning for Kids“.

I’ve got some spare copies of it that need a good home, so I thought it might be fun to run a competition!

I’ve got five copies that I’m going to give away in this competition.



To enter, I’m looking for new ideas for teaching children about AI and machine learning.

This could be an idea for a new machine learning project worksheet. You can see machinelearningforkids.co.uk/worksheets for examples of the sorts of thing this could cover. You could contribute a new worksheet, or if you’d prefer, you can just explain your idea for a new project worksheet and what students would learn from it.

This can include an idea for a new feature or capability on the Machine Learning for Kids website. You could contribute a design for the new capability, or you can just explain how it would work and what students would learn from it.

To take part, email your ideas to competition@machinelearningforkids.co.uk by 4th June 2021.

I’ll choose my five favourite ideas, and post a free paperback copy of my book to each of the five winners.

Full details and terms below, but please note the really big one: UK residents only, please. Sorry, but I don’t want to get into international shipping – so please only enter if you’ve got a UK address I could post a book to!

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Building a Question Answering game in Scratch

Saturday, April 17th, 2021

I added a new project worksheet to Machine Learning for Kids today.

It has step-by-step instructions for how to make a quiz show game in Scratch that uses a machine learning model to understand questions on any topic the student chooses, and find the answer in Wikipedia pages.

It’s a fun little project, super simple to make, and works surprisingly well. It doesn’t get every question right, but it does a lot better than I expected.

I don’t normally write blog posts when I write new ML for Kids worksheets, but this one was a bit interesting.

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Machine learning workshop for school teachers

Friday, April 2nd, 2021

This week I ran a remote workshop for school teachers about machine learning and artificial intelligence. It was organised with University College London as part of a series of activities they are running to celebrate the CS Expo: 40+ years of UCL Computer Science.

It was quite a long session, as we wanted it to be a hands-on practical CPD (Continuing Professional Development) workshop rather than just me giving a short talk. In the 90-minute workshop, we made two separate AI projects, which was a chance to see and contrast a few different approaches.

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