Sirkku Tahvanainen – “Making future Artificial Intelligence makers : Designing Better Life”.
Our first speaker Sirkku is the Head of Education at Code School Finland. She teaches coding, robotics and AI to children and train teachers all over the world to do the same. Her talk was on the reasons why we should teach Artificial Intelligence to children and how to do so. While AI is a topic that can be very complex Code School Finland is breaking it down to something that can be successfully taught to children where Sirkku was explaining that she has been teaching children as young as 5 years about AI.
She explained about the three pillars that students and teachers need in teaching/learning AI. That is the right attitude, right practices and a suitable learning path.
With right attitude she refers to a maker’s attitude where they need to take an active role in their learning. We should move away from a teacher centerer learning and allow the students to explore and experiment with AI while making use of things that are interesting and relevant to the student’s everyday life.
This student centered approach helps promote Critical thinking, Creativity, Communication, Collaboration and Computational thinking. Computational thinking helps students to characterize information and to understand the logic behind computer controlled devices which in turn help the students to build a problem solvers mindset.
With right practices she explains first one need to understand that AI does not stand on its own as it is closely linked to coding and robotics and in learning about AI we also need to learn about coding and robotics/automation. Coding is needed for both AI as well as robotics/automation. Robotics and Automation on the other hand is what generates the data needed for the AI.
With suitable learning path she refers to the components and building blocks needed in learning AI as well as the order of when they need to be introduced to the learner. Each building block should match the student’s level of understanding. In this process you will also learn that AI is all around and highly relevant in our daily lives. We as humans are the ones who control the AI and here it is also important to learn about the ethics in various uses of AI.
These topics make sense even to very young learners when combined with practical and unplugged activities. We can for instance make use of the children’s own toys when introducing AI where they can learn to sort them according to various different criterial. She also mentioned an example of using picture cards describing the various steps in washing the hands where the children can sort the cards in an order that make sense in order to get clean hands. With these practices the children actually learns about algorithms which is step by step instructions towards reaching certain goals.
With primary school students she suggests making use of visual programming languages such as Scratch. One can for instance make machine vision systems that can recognize different kind of objects. She once brought bananas and apples to her coding classes where the children wrote code that helped their laptop distinguish the kind of objects shown to the built in web camera.
With older students it makes sense to move over to textual programming languages such as Python. Once moved to textual programming languages there are no limits to the kind of AI projects the students can do. She mentioned examples of where students have been working on weather prediction models making use of different sensors.
She moved over to explaining how ordinary teachers without previous experience in teaching AI can start teaching this to their students. In order to do that it is important for the teachers to have the support of well-designed teaching materials. With material that contains “maker” AI projects any teacher can support their students on their AI learning path as the teacher does not need to be an expert on the topic but rather there to support the students in their AI project works.
She continued with sharing the Code School Finland curriculum that is modular and can easily be adapted to suit any school situation and objectives. She ended her talk with highlighting that not all students will end up being AI makers but all students need to learn the basics of coding, robotics and AI. The aim is to have the students be makers and not only consumers.
Jarren Gangiah – Coding at Charles Duna Primary in New Brighton, Gqebehra (EC)
Our second speaker Jarren is a primary school teacher at Charles Duna Primary School, a school of more than 1000 students in the township New Brighton. Charles Duna was also one of Code School Finland’s pilot schools in South Africa where Jarren was one of the teachers trained.
Jarren started with emphasizing the message that anyone can teach coding and that he is an example of that. He highlighted that the school is situated in a low income area with complex socio-economic problems. The added challenges of being a township school are however a motivating factor to do even more and luckily they have good support from the community.
When not having the best infrastructure or background it becomes important to have sufficient teacher training supported through quality teaching materials which he believe Code School Finland was able to provide during the pilot. Prior to the pilot they had implemented a coding club at the school where they had the kids bring in their grandparents to tell stories, which were then transcribed and coded into animated stories in scratch.
The coding activities at the school are a springboard for the student’s interest in IT, computer studies and AI. IT professionals has become a preferred career choice by many of the students which would not have been the case in the past. In addition they have also started some EV3 Lego projects with the kids at Charles Duna. Not being an expert himself allows him to learn together with the kids as they move along with the projects.
From their experience coding and robotics training is something that really excites the students as they find the coding classes in the computer lab much more stimulating than their other standard book studies. The coding experience opens new doors for the learners. The additional skills developed such as logical thinking, computational thinking and team work is what is going to help them in the 21 century work place they will be faced with when completing their studies.
What he really likes about the Code School Finland modules is that they are very flexible and allows the students to learn at their own pace. They are also able to engage with the material independently. Another project recently started at the school is that they will have their own aquaponics garden where they will use sensor technologies and arduinos to manage things like pH and water temperature etc.
Many of the activities are multidisciplinary in a way where coding is only one of the skills that the students are gaining in the process. He is also emphasizing the importance of moving the students from consuming knowledge to creating knowledge. The students need to understand that an African child from New Brighton is someone who is able to create and bring their own ideas to life.
I am interested to be trained on how to teach coding and robotics