education

108 Articles

Facebook Wants To Teach Machine Learning

August 8, 2018 by 21 Comments

When you think of technical education about machine learning, Facebook might not be the company that pops into your head. However, the company uses machine learning, and they’ve rolled out a six-part video series that they say “shares best real-world practices and provides practical tips about how to apply machine-learning capabilities to real-world problems.”

The videos correspond to what they say are the six aspects of machine learning development:

  1. Problem definition
  2. Data
  3. Evaluation
  4. Features
  5. Model
  6. Experimentation

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Computer Programming Unplugged For Kids

August 3, 2018 by 10 Comments

There was a time when computers were far too expensive to let mere students use them. In those days, we wrote fake programs for fictitious machines and checked them by hand. That wasn’t fun, but it did teach you to think about the algorithm. You weren’t worried about how many tabs to indent code in the editor, or checking your social media feed, or changing the track on your Spotify playlist. Maybe that was the idea behind Computer Science Unplugged. The site is aimed at educators and gives them lesson plans to teach kids about computer concepts through activities that don’t use a computer.

The target ages are from 5 to 14 and topics range from binary numbers, sorting, searching, error detection, and robotics. For example, one exercise has students line up to be bits in a binary number. Each kid holds a card that is blank on one side or has the right number of dots on the other (for example, bit 0 has 1 dot, bit 2 has 4 dots, and so on).

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Algorithms For Visual Learners

May 6, 2018 by 10 Comments

Computer programming is a lot like chess. It is fairly simple to teach people the moves. But knowing how the pieces move isn’t the reason you can win. You have to understand how the pieces work together. It is easy to learn the mechanics of a for loop or a Java interface. But what makes programs work are algorithms. There are many books and classes dedicated to algorithms, but if you are a visual learner, you might be interested in a site that shows visualizations of algorithms called VisuAlgo.

The site is from [Dr. Steven Halim] and is meant for students at the National University of Singapore, but it is available “free of charge for Computer Science community on earth.” We suspect if any astronauts or cosmonauts wanted to use it in space, they’d be OK with that, too.

The animations and commentary take you through algorithms ranging from the common — sorting and linked lists — to the obscure — Steiner and Fenwick trees. Each animation frame has some commentary, so it isn’t just pretty pictures. The site is available in many languages, too.

Many of the animations allow you to set up problems and execute them using a C-like pseudo language. When it executes, you can watch the execution pointer and a box comments on the current operation. For example, in the linked list unit, you can create a random doubly linked list and then search it for a particular value. Not only can you see the code, but the graphical representation of the list will update as the code runs.

The site allows you to register for free to get additional features, but we didn’t and it was still a great read about many different data structures. Also, a few of the commentary slides require you to show you are actually a computer science professor — we assume there’s some copyright issue involved because it is only a few.

This site is a great example of how many free educational resources are out there on the web. It isn’t just computer science either. MITx — or more generally, edX — has some great hardware classes and many other topics

A Blockchain, Robotics And AI Event In Vietnam

April 27, 2018 by 7 Comments

Blockchain Education Network Vietnam recently held an event titled “Building a Robotics & Artificial Intelligence Ecosystem with Blockchain”. The title alone has three of my favorite things in it, so when a client of mine asked me if I could put together a little hardware demonstration for the event, I jumped at the opportunity.

I also thought I’d take a moment to write about it, because I haven’t seen much coverage of emerging technology events in the developing world, and the fact is that there’s a consistently high level of interest. I’ve yet to go to an event that wasn’t filled to capacity, and I hope to share some of that enthusiasm with you.

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Hack Your Own Computer Science Degree

January 4, 2018 by 38 Comments

We ran across something interesting on GitHub of all places. The “Open Source Society University” has a list of resources to use if you want to teach yourself computer science for free. We found it interesting because there are so many resources available it can be hard to pick and choose. Of course, you can always pick a track from one school, but it was interesting to see what [Eric Douglas] and contributors thought would be a good foundation.

If you dig down, there are really a few potential benefits from going to college. One is you might learn something — although we’ve found that isn’t always a given, surprisingly. The second is you can get a piece of paper to frame that impresses most people, especially those that want to hire you but can’t determine if you know what you are talking about or not. Lastly, if you go to the right school you can meet people that might be useful to know in the future for different reasons.

The Internet has really changed all of those things, you can network pretty easily these days without a class ring, and there are lots of ways to earn accredited diplomas online. If you are interested in what we think is the most important part — the education — there are many options for that too.

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Students Build Electromagnetic Egg Drop Stand

November 24, 2017 by 6 Comments

The Egg Drop is a classic way to get students into engineering, fabrication, and experimentation. It’s a challenge to build a container to protect a raw egg from cracking when dropped from various heights.

Here’s a way to add some extra hardware to use when testing each entry. It’s an  electromagnetic drop stand built by several students along with [Tom Jenkins]. The stand doesn’t require anything too exotic, and it allows students to drop their eggs in a controlled manner for a fair competition. Along the way, they learn about circuits, electromagnets, and some other electronic concepts.

If this sounds familiar, it is because it builds on the egg drop project from the Teaching Channel we talked about before. The materials for that lesson have the basic outline of the drop stand, but the video really helps kids visualize it and build it.

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LEGO-compatible Electronics Kits Everywhere!

October 12, 2017 by 19 Comments

Within the last few years, a lot of companies have started with the aim to disrupt the educational electronics industry using their LEGO-compatible sets. Now they’re ubiquitous, and fighting each other for their slice of space in your child’s box of bricks. What’s going on here?

Raison D’Être

The main reason for LEGO-compatibility is familiarity. Parents and children get LEGO. They have used it. They already have a bunch. When it comes to leveling up and learning about electronics, it makes sense to do that by adding on to a thing they already know and understand, and it means they can continue to play with and get more use from their existing sets. The parent choosing between something that’s LEGO-compatible and a completely separate ecosystem like littleBits (or Capsela) sees having to set aside all the LEGO and buy all new plastic parts and learn the new ecosystem, which is a significant re-investment. littleBits eventually caught on and started offering adapter plates, and that fact demonstrates how much demand there is to stick with the studs.

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