Hello, I’m Juan David Rodríguez, LearningML developer. I started this project at the beginning of 2019 and published it for the educational community in May 2020. The tool began to spread thanks to the online research that, together with other colleagues, we carried out to check if the tool was suitable for learning and teach Artificial Intelligence content. The results were very encouraging and led to a publication that was accepted at SIGCSE ’21. Since then, thanks to friends who have contributed to spreading the project, the LearningML user community has grown considerably, reaching more than 10,000 monthly visits… and continues to grow.
As a LearningML developer I find this impressive, it makes me extremely happy and it motivates me to continue maintaining and developing the project. Unfortunately, as I have been developing new functionalities, the development becomes more complex, since continuing to grow with the guarantees that everything continues to work requires more and more time. On the other hand, the project has no financial support and until now the expenses necessary to maintain the technological infrastructure have been covered by myself. To ensure that the application provides uninterrupted service to the growing number of users, I have been increasing the dimensions of said infrastructure and, therefore, expenses are increasing.
My greatest wish is to continue offering unrestricted and free access to the entire educational community, wherever they are from, and to continue contributing to the teaching and learning of Artificial Intelligence and Computational Thinking. But the project is taking on dimensions that could frustrate my best intentions if I don’t get financial support. So I have decided to continue betting on LearningML and I have created the LearningML Association for the promotion and development of Artificial Intelligence in Education with the aim of raising funds to cover the following aspects:
- Guarantee the maintenance of the technological infrastructure required by LearningML.
- Develop new features that help teach more AI-related content, such as reinforcement learning, unsupervised learning, or generative AI.
- Improve the LearningML website.
- Prepare Open Educational Resources for teaching AI.
- Improve LearningML Desktop installers for Windows and MacOS, purchasing the necessary certificates for these operating systems to trust the author when installing.
- Develop courses on AI
- Everything that the funds raised allow us to do.
Therefore, if you like LearningML, you are finding it useful, you use it in your courses and/or resources, or you simply like the idea of the project continuing to evolve, I encourage you to collaborate on the project by making a donation using this button. You can make a one-time or regular donation. All donations are valuable but the way to guarantee its maintenance and obtain funds to develop new features is through periodic contributions.
Finally, if you have a company, association or foundation interested in LearningML continuing to serve and develop, you can become a premium sponsor and we will place your logo with a link to your website in the footer of the LearningML editor.
Thank you very much for all these years of dissemination and use of LearningML! We continue!
Juan David Rodríguez