We are pleased to announce a new AI-themed challenge for young people: the Experience AI Challenge invites and supports young people aged up to 18 to design and make their own AI applications. This is their chance to have a taste of getting creative with the powerful technology of machine learning. And equally exciting: every young creator will get feedback and encouragement from us at the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
As you may have heard, we recently launched a series of classroom lessons called Experience AI in partnership with Google DeepMind. The lesson materials make it easy for teachers of all subjects to teach their learners aged up to 18 about artificial intelligence and machine learning. Now the Experience AI Challenge gives young people the opportunity to develop their skills further and build their own AI applications.
Key information
- Starts on 08 January 2024
- Free to take part in
- Designed for beginners, based on the tools Scratch and Machine Learning for Kids
- Open for official submissions made by UK-based young people aged up to 18 and their mentors
- Young people and their mentors around the world are welcome to access the Challenge resources and make AI projects
- Tailored resources for young people and mentors to support you to take part
- Register your interest and we’ll send you a reminder email on the launch day
The Experience AI Challenge
For the Experience AI Challenge, you and the young people you work with will learn how to make a machine learning (ML) classifier that organises data types such as audio, text, or images into different groupings that you specify.
The Challenge resources show young people the basic principles of using the tools and training ML models. Then they will use these new skills to create their own projects, and it’s a chance for their imaginations to run free. Here are some examples of projects your young tech creators could make:
- An instrument classifier to identify the type of musical instrument being played in pieces of music
- An animal sound identifier to determine which animal is making a particular sound
- A voice command recogniser to detect voice commands like ‘stop’, ‘go’, ‘left’, and ‘right’
- A photo classifier to identify what kind of food is shown in a photograph
All creators will receive expert feedback on their projects.
To make the Experience AI Challenge as familiar and accessible as possible for young people who may be new to coding, we designed it for beginners. We chose the free, easy-to-use, online tool Machine Learning for Kids for young people to train their machine learning models, and Scratch as the programming environment for creators to code their projects. If you haven’t used these tools before, don’t worry. The Challenge resources will provide all the support you need to get up to speed.
Training an ML model and creating a project with it teaches many skills beyond coding, including computational thinking, ethical programming, data literacy, and developing a broader understanding of the influence of AI on society.
The three Challenge stages
Our resources for creators and mentors walk you through the three stages of the Experience AI Challenge.
Stage 1: Explore and discover
The first stage of the Challenge is designed to ignite young people’s curiosity. Through our resources, mentors let participants explore the world of AI and ML and discover how these technologies are revolutionising industries like healthcare and entertainment.
Stage 2: Get hands-on
In the second stage, young people choose a data type and embark on a guided example project. They create a training dataset, train an ML model, and develop a Scratch application as the user interface for their model.
Stage 3: Design and create
In the final stage, mentors support young people to apply what they’ve learned to create their own ML project that addresses a problem they’re passionate about. They submit their projects to us online and receive feedback from our expert panel.
Things to do today
- Visit our new Experience AI Challenge homepage to find out more details
- Register your interest so you receive a reminder email on launch day, 8 January
- Get your young people excited and thinking about what kind of AI project they might like to create
We can’t wait to see how you and your young creators choose to engage with the Experience AI Challenge!
Website: LINK
