Coding@Christmas meets AI in STEM Education
In the EU Code Week Coding@Christmas competition, educators all over Europe are invited to engage students in creative coding activities and every activity registered on the Code Week website by 20th December even has the chance to win a prize!
This has inspired us to create a little coding project modelled on our AI in STEM Education teaching materials. Our EcoKids Teach AI and STEM Resources 4.0 classroom projects use the Scratch or PictoBlox programming platform to integrate machine learning models into a coding project. Why not do something similar and train a model to classify Christmas and summer images?
Here's how it works:
1. Have your students take or collect pictures with Christmas or winter motives (decoration, cookies, snowflakes...) as well as a set of pictures with summer motives (flowers, beaches, cocktails, ice cream cones...). These are your "training data sets". Collect some additional images from both classes for a "test data set".
2. Upload these images into the image classifier tool in the PictoBlox Machine Learning environment and train a model to differentiate "Christmas" and "summer".
3. Use the programming blocks for "Machine Learning Environment" and "Text-to-Speech" to code a little program that has your chosen actor (the little figure in the PictoBlox program) announce "Merry Christmas!" or "Enjoy your summer!" depending on the test images from the uploaded data set.
Step-by-step instructions can be found in this video:
We hope that you enjoy this little coding challenge. You can share all your festive coding activities on Instagram by tagging the EU Code Week at @codeweekeu.They will be sharing outstanding posts on their Instagram and Facebook stories!
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