AI News 11a/2023: GenAI Teachable Machine is still being finalised and the learning materials are in progress.

Welcome to the monthly newsletter of the Generation AI project. There will be at least one letter per month. You can subscribe to this newsletter either here on LinkedIN or on our project website: https://www.generation-ai-stn.fi/uutiskirje/

1. GenAI Teachable Machine is our first application and it is starting to be ready

During the first full year of our project, we have developed a teaching machine that enables children and young people to develop AI applications and learn the basics of machine learning.

Gen AI The machine to be taught can be used free of charge and without restriction: https://tm.generation-ai-stn.fi

Technical instructions for use can be found on our project website: https://www.generation-ai-stn.fi/genai-opetettava-kone/

2. The machine to be taught is the result of co-creation between researchers, teachers and students

Since last spring, our partner schools (hundreds of students and dozens of teachers in total) have been using the teaching machine and early learning materials as part of their school work. As this is an early stage development of methods, learning materials and applications, the school’s work has been supported by the presence of researchers and the collection of scientific research data.

This co-development process has provided us with valuable feedback and research material, which has been used to further develop the app and learning materials throughout 2023. As a result of co-development, the application has been further developed as follows:

• Support for mobile devices and their front and rear cameras. In the first co-creation experiments, pupils used laptops.
• Support for sharing the app with other students or groups of students (everyone can test each other’s apps on their own device)
• Support for group work. Previously, the machine you were teaching could only be used with one device.
• Remix support A teacher or student can share a copy of their teaching machine with other students in a teaching situation. This allows the teacher to share their example machine with students and they can modify their copy as they wish [not yet an easy interface, but it works]
• Material support. Starting the machine from the teaching material with ready-made content.

3. The teaching machine is designed to respect the privacy and data protection of students and teachers.

Our multidisciplinary project involves not only educationalists and computer scientists, but also legal researchers specialising in children’s and young people’s digital rights, data protection, etc.

This ensures that the applications we develop take data protection and privacy issues into account in a cross-cutting way.

Although the machine being taught is effectively either an image classifier (imagenet model) or a gesture classifier (posenet model), all image processing is done in the Tensorflow machine learning model that can be downloaded locally to the device’s web browser.

Various teamwork and sharing features are implemented in such a way that information is transferred directly from one browser to another. Personal work is stored and uploaded locally directly to the device.

The machine to be taught is not integrated with any cloud service or other system that would require logging in with some credentials.

4. The learning materials will be published by EDUCA204

During the co-development process, any Finnish teacher or student has been able to use the GenAI teaching machine as part of their teaching, but without any finalised teaching materials.

In the co-development schools, teaching materials have been used which have required either the presence of a researcher in the classroom or other significant and ongoing support to support the teacher’s work.

We are currently developing learning materials that will allow anyone to use our first AI application in their teaching. The aim is to publish the educational material at the EDUCA2024 event in January.

5. Are you interested in testing the Spring 2024 materials and teaching machine in your school?

Until now, the use of the teaching machine has only been the domain of early adopters. Now we’re taking a step towards the regular classroom by launching the learning materials at Educa 2024 in January.

Despite this, we still need feedback on how the materials work. Are you an educational organisation or an individual teacher interested in using the Spring 2024 package, consisting of the app and materials?

We will also be collecting survey data from this stage, in which case you should also commit to participating in the data collection.

However, the key is to get enough schools, teachers and students to use our materials and application in the so-called “learning communities”. in a context outside the project.

We will tell you more about this opportunity soon. Follow us on social media or visit our website(https://www.generation-ai-stn.fi)

In addition to LinkedIN, you can find us on Facebook, Instagram and X.

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