AI Meets Pedagogy
“How similar would a kindergarten for AI be to a human one?”, asks storyteller & programmer Linda Liukas
The following is an excerpt from this week’s Exponential View newsletter guest-curated by the programmer, educator and storyteller Linda Liukas. Linda is finishing her second book, about the ways to teach machine learning to six-year-olds.
(If you’re not a reader of Exponential View yet, I recommend you subscribe: I will send a thoughtful analysis of our exponential times to your inbox every Sunday AM. Subscribe)
Pedagogy & AI by Linda Liukas
If intelligent machines are trained, not programmed, how similar would a kindergarten for AI be to a human one? And what could real kids teach robots? One of my favorite things in the research world of the 1960s and 1970s is how Minsky, Papert and other AI luminaries are referenced in early childhood research and vice versa. I wish these conversations would keep happening.
Curiosity. Jean Piaget, a famous child development psychologist once said the best preschool curriculum is about keeping children curious, making them wonder, and offering them real problem-solving challenges, rather than trying to transfer the knowledge. Pair with Curiosity-driven Exploration by Self-supervised Prediction(2017).
Movement. Hajimete No Otsukai is a Japanese TV series of children as young as two running their first errands in their neighborhood. It’s exciting and touching to watch the children overcome the obstacles both physical and emotional and develop self-efficacy. Pair with the gym environments of OpenAI (2018) or Carnegie Mellon’s dribbling avatars (2018).
Metaphysics. Sherry Turkle wrote in The Second Self in the 1980s about children’s relationship with computers as a new kind of object — psychological, yet a thing.
“Childhood animism, this attribution of the properties of life to inanimate objects, is only gradually displaced by new ways of understanding the physical world in terms of physical processes. In time the child learns that the stone falls because of gravity; intentions have nothing to do with it. […] And so a dichotomy is constructed: physical and psychological properties stand opposed to one another in two great systems. The physical is used to understand things, the psychological to understand people and animals.”
But the computer is the exception, especially at this age when children grow up having conversations with a computer. Pair with the Allen Institute Research on reasoning and common sense (2018).
AI playtime:
In the spirit of life-long learning through play, I invite you to take some time this week to play alone or with your family with some of the best resources to understand and experiment with machine learning:
- Machine Learning for Kids by Dale Lane. You train machine learning models for text classifying, numbers and recognising images, but with Scratch and kid-friendly context!
- Wolfram Alpha’s machine learning resources allow for practical and fun exercises around images, color and translations.
- We could all learn from the Koreans and the textbooks they use to teach AI.
