In recent years AI has become an ever-present term and tool in our everyday lives. What started as machine learning research in the 1950s has since become a pocket intelligence we all have access to. But a question our students tried to answer is :
What actually is AI?
Their initial thoughts:
ARTIFICIAL
– not human
– man-made
INTELLIGENCE
– problem-solving
– capacity to learn
– capacity to think
– communication
The Raspberry Pi Foundation, in collaboration with Google DeepMind has developed a 4 week lesson plan to help secondary age students understand how AI works, what machine learning is, what techniques it uses to analyse and generate data and how it can and should be used.
In today’s first lesson our students discussed what they already know about AI, what thoughts and feelings they have about it and what it is and is NOT. Here are some of the ideas our students had:
| What AI is | What AI is not |
|---|---|
| – a powerful tool – fast – a research area – good at analysing data | – reliable – trustworthy – always right – feeling & thinking |
We also discussed language used when talking about AI. The students agreed that using humanised language could lead people to think AI is more thinking and feeling than it actually is.
“You wouldn’t say that a hammer creates a fence. It’s just a tool, not a person.”
They then used a generative AI tool to create images from prompts and discussed where the application went right or wrong, whether the result was expected and where the errors may be coming from.
It’s been a really good first lesson full of critical thinking, discussions and important considerations.
Next week we’ll be looking at machine learning and how machine learning systems are created using a data-driven approach including something called “supervised learning”.