Closing user accounts

(Translated by https://www.deepl.com/)

Thanks to the interest shown by the teaching community in Spain, Latin America and some other countries where the tool is being used, LearningML has become a project with a sufficient scope that its maintenance requires more time than I can dedicate.

However, I want to continue to develop tools to help teach and learn the basics of AI in school. I came to the conclusion that the most appropriate thing to do is to support the parts of the project that contribute to the pedagogical dimension. I am referring specifically to user accounts and project storage in the cloud.

They are useful features, but both the effort required to maintain them and their cost are beyond my financial and material possibilities. I have decided to “sacrifice” those parts in order to continue advancing in aspects that I consider more relevant for teaching and much more attractive and motivating!

As of today, it is no longer possible to create new accounts in both version 1.2 and 1.3 (which is still called beta, although it is now stable and I will soon change its name).

All of you who have an account (more than 7000 users, what a shame to close the accounts!) and have projects that you want to keep, you can download them locally to your computer. All you have to do is log in, upload the project to the cloud in LearningML and then save it to your computer (“File -> Save to your computer” menu). You can do this until April 15, 2023, after which you will no longer be able to log in to LearningML.

This is all????

No, I don’t want to say goodbye with a pessimistic tone, because there is no reason for that. You can always save your projects locally and share them with your colleagues via email, USB stick or any other medium. By eliminating the LearningML cloud, I will have more time to focus on what matters most: the development of features that help to better understand AI techniques.

In addition, a desktop version has been available for a few months now at https://web.learningml.org/learningml-para-escritorio/. You can install it on your computer and use it offline. Soon, this desktop version will be enhanced to program Echidna educational robotics boards, based on Arduino (https://echidna.es). You will be able to design and build very complete projects that combine robotics with Artificial Intelligence. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

And that’s all I had to tell you. I hope that together we will continue building and improving this exciting project. And learning some important keys to better understand the complex digital society in which, for better or worse, we live.