LearningML is a personal project that I started in March 2019. For its development I counted on the help, advice and opinions of several good friends and education professionals. It all started with the making of an educational resource about teaching Machine Learning at school. When I was working in the “Department of Experimentation in the Classroom” of INTEF.
Between November 2019 and May 2020, the development had a high intensity phase at the end of which I released a first functional version of the platform. It was presented to the educational community to be used in real learning environments. Since then, the development was limited to adding translations into different languages (English, Galician, Catalan, Italian, German and Greek) that, kindly and selflessly, were made by some LearningML users.
At the beginning of May 2020, I started to prepare a research co-led by several members of the KGBL-III research group. We intended to test whether LearningML was an appropriate tool for teaching and learning ML (instructional validity) to children between the ages of 10 and 16. Also, whether it was easy to use and attractive (face validity).
The result was reflected in the paper “Evaluation of an Online Intervention to Teach Artificial Intelligence with LearningML to 10-16-Year-Old Students”. It was accepted at the SIGCSE ’21 conference on Computing Science Education and published in its proceedings. You can download a preprint for free.
LearningML was presented at the 1st Edition of the Fortnightly Seminars of the Raspberry Pi Foundation and in a book compiling all the experiences presented. It was present at the Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality Congress. In the event organized by the Cruzando Foundation of Chile on Artificial Intelligence in schools. With the opening of the community to Ibero-America.
Step by step…
AI and Machine Learning are topics that aroused the interest of many teachers interested in the development and teaching of Computational Thinking. Thanks to all this dissemination, LearningML reached many of them! The most gratifying part of this work is the messages of encouragement and gratitude that I receive from some teachers and even from some students.
Within the general interest in teaching Computational Thinking, AI and ML at school, some teacher training courses have included LearningML as an appropriate teaching tool. Especially because of how easy it is to use.
I am very grateful and satisfied for the support received and the result obtained. To have reached this point is a sufficient reward for all the work done during these two and a bit years. The platform as it is, will be useful to many teachers and students to better understand what is hidden under the term “Artificial Intelligence”.
And at this point, I find myself in a moment in which I am assailed by some questions: what now, how do I continue, do I leave things as they are until the interest in this topic disappears? And other similar questions that sound in the same tone and provoke the same effect: blockage.
For all these reasons, I have started to write this article, to see if in this way, I can find an answer that crosses what I want to do with what I can do.