Can computers be creative?
October 25th, 2017Kids at barcamp
October 19th, 2017I’ve been a fan of barcamps for a while, and have been going to any that I can for at least ten years.
In recent years, I’ve encouraged my kids to come along with me, and in the spirit of barcamp, to think of something they could bring to share or talk about.
Grace did a talk about her experiences being taught ICT at primary school at Barcamp Berkshire in 2013.
Grace did a demo of how kids are taught to do sums in school today at Barcamp Bournemouth in 2014.
Faith did a talk about owls (and chatbots) at Barcamp Southampton in 2016.
Last Saturday, it was Barcamp Southampton again, and Faith decided to run a session.
This time, she chose to do a ukulele lesson.
We borrowed a car boot-full of ukuleles from Hampshire Music Service. (We owe them a big thanks!)
She set up the room with a ukulele on every seat for everyone who came to her session.
And she’d made a few PowerPoint slides with finger patterns on to help get people started.
Before too long, she had a bunch of adults (who’d never played ukulele before!) strumming along, leading us all as we echoed her strumming patterns. We sounded okay by the end!
I love this event @BarcampSouth, what a perfect way to kick off a day of inspiration and learning ? pic.twitter.com/TRNu4vBwwr
— Dan Thomas (@DannyT) October 14, 2017
I was super proud of her. There is no way I’d have been brave enough to try it when I was her age.
And, like her sister, it was a more creative and fun idea for a talk than the usual stand-in-front-of-slides-and-talk sessions that I always do.
Machine Learning for Kids event at Hursley
August 30th, 2017On Tuesday, a couple of dozen children (aged 8-14) spent the afternoon at Hursley so I could give them an intro to machine learning using some of the activities I’ve written for machinelearningforkids.co.uk.
I think it went pretty well, so I thought it’d be good to share what we did.
This was what the room looked like before the kids arrived… with just my two kids helping me set up. It all got a lot busier after this!
The general approach was letting them all work at computers, guided by a worksheet to build something that illustrated an aspect of machine learning. And then following this with a group discussion to draw out what they observed and what it meant.
We did this all together for the first couple of activities. Because of the large age range in the group, after this I let them split up and tackle different activities at different speeds, and followed this up by discussing their projects with them in smaller groups.
MachineLearningForKids.co.uk
August 2nd, 2017I’d like to introduce “Machine Learning for Kids“: a tool to help school children learn about machine learning by making things with it.
The video above is a walkthrough of the tool and examples of how I’ve been using it. The rest of this post is a transcript for the video.
machinelearningforkids.co.uk is a simple tool for training a variety of types of machine learning model, and an environment for creating games and other interactive projects that use them.
This is done by extending Scratch: a visual programming environment created to teach coding to kids, that is widely used in schools and other educational organisations like Code Club and Girls Who Code.
It gives students a blank canvas without prescribing what they make. They’re free to use their imagination and creativity to find fun uses for the machine learning models that they train.
Introducing Machine Learning to kids
July 4th, 2017Today, I was helping out with a Computing summer school for teachers in London.
As part of this, I gave a presentation about machine learning to a room full of school teachers – about what it is, why I think we should be introducing it in the classroom, and how I think we could do that.
My slides are on Slideshare, but they might not make a lot of sense by themselves, so I’ll jot down here roughly what I said.
This morning I want to talk to you about machine learning. In particular, I want to talk with you about machine learning in the context of education and how it could be introduced in the classroom.
I’m going to try and cover three main points.
Firstly, a quick level set on what I mean by machine learning.
Then I’d like to talk about why I believe it’s important that we do this.
Finally, I want to talk about the practicalities of how we could effectively introduce machine learning in an accessible way.
weatherbot
April 23rd, 2017TJBot is an open-source do-it-yourself kit for building a small Raspberry-Pi-powered robot.
Building
In the Easter holidays, we spent an afternoon building it…
Making a start on our TJBot (thanks to @jtonline and @andysc!) pic.twitter.com/yNfjcW4GXp
— Dale Lane (@dalelane) April 14, 2017
…and wiring it…
Wiring. #TJBot pic.twitter.com/PnirOojTvW
— Dale Lane (@dalelane) April 14, 2017
This gave us a tiny plastic robot with a light in his head, and an arm that can rotate back and forth. He sits on the kitchen shelf next to the Alexa.
This weekend, we tried doing something with it.
I-Spy (using Watson services from Scratch projects)
February 22nd, 2017It’s half-term week, so that means more time for geekiness with the kids.
This is something Grace made this week: a game of “I spy” built using Scratch, that uses the Watson Vision Recognition API to let the game dynamically pick objects that it recognises in photos, so you can then make guesses.
Apart from being a fun game to make in it’s own right, I wanted to share why I particularly think it’s useful to be able to use Watson API’s from Scratch projects.
Will AI destroy the human race? A debate at The Arts Club
February 20th, 2017
The Arts Club Debating Society – Robots Will Destroy The Human Race from The Arts Club on Vimeo.
Aidan Laverty, Murray Shanahan, Ian Yorston, George Zarkadakis, and me.
This was a weird evening.