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 (as indicated by the analysis tool that plots the visits), LearningML has become a project of sufficient size that its maintenance requires more time than I can dedicate to it.

However, I want to continue developing tools that help to teach and learn the basics of Artificial Intelligence in schools. So, after much thought about how to continue without having to sacrifice too much of my personal life, I have come to the conclusion that it is best to stop supporting the parts of the project that contribute the least to the pedagogical dimension. I am referring specifically to the user accounts and the storage of projects in the cloud.

Although there is no doubt that they are useful functionalities, both the effort required to maintain them and their cost are beyond my financial and material possibilities. So I have decided to “sacrifice” those parts of LearningML in order to have time to continue advancing in other aspects that I consider more relevant for teaching and, moreover, are much more attractive and motivating.

Therefore, 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 change its name shortly).

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

But I don’t want to say goodbye on a pessimistic note, as there is no reason for that. You know that you can always save your projects locally and share them with your colleagues by email, on a USB stick or through any other medium. As I have already said, by eliminating the LearningML cloud I will have more time to focus on what matters most: the development of functionalities that help to better understand Artificial Intelligence techniques.

Also, I don’t know if you are familiar with the desktop version that has been available for some months at https://web.learningml.org/learningml-para-escritorio/. You can install it on your computer and use it offline. And what’s more, I can tell you that soon this desktop version will be improved to program the Echidna educational robotics boards, based on Arduino (https://echidna.es). So 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 to build and improve this exciting project and learn some important keys that help us to better understand the complex digital society in which, for better or worse, we live.