Before The Basics

For the first few Saturdays at Kathmandu AI

The Kathmandu Valley chapter for AI Saturdays was excited to run again after its successful completion in the last cycle. We had new, excited faces, wanting to learn how the world works in the field of Artificial Intelligence. To both the participants and the organizers, it has been a great portal for exploring the realm and building networks for the same. Here are some of my recollections of what we did in our workshops.

Here we begin
The First Saturday

Through our initial survey of participants before the cycle started, we found out that most of our participants were complete beginners to Artificial Intelligence. We decided that we would be focusing more on the beginners. Before showering them with content and machine learning jargon, we thought it would be best to let them settle in on the environment. So, the first day was primarily focused on building networks, setting up environments, explaining our motives, and overall initiation to the community. It was a very rewarding experience to our team as well because we received an awful lot of positive feedback during our post-event networking.

We began the day by introducing them to nurture.ai and its initiative. We then went on to explain how our course would be structured and what they would have to spend time on, if they wanted to improve. As we did want them to get their hands dirty with some practical tasks, we presented them with some basic python notebooks, explained how they’re used, drilled through the basics of python, and ended the day with a mini-project on a basic image secret decryption program in python. We provided the source code and everyone was very engaged with what they were doing. We decided to follow a similar pattern in the upcoming events as well: let everyone settle in, establish grounds for the day, get them engaged, and leave off with a mini-project that we curated. The networking was also very alive and well as everyone was very interactive and helpful to their peers. We have the great privilege of facilitating such collaborative environments and are seeing important relations being formulated in our workshops.

Moving on
The next days

Since we were to complete the course content in the stipulated Saturdays so that we’d be on track, we dived into python libraries and other exercises to get them more engaged eventually. To get them accustomed to Object-Oriented Programming, we made a template for a user management system to show off python’s object handling capabilities. We expanded on the numpy and pandas modules and plan to continue to do so with the scikit-learn module as well.

Although our ambassadors have their exams going on, a lot of us are actively participating in the events or providing logistical support for the event. We’re hopeful that we will be able to provide a good foundation to our participants if we continue in a similar manner. Onto the next Saturdays!