This week for my coding exercise I tried out the Hour of Code exercise where i had to program an AI to sort out trash from the ocean, while keeping the fish in the ocean. It started by asking whether the item was a fish or not, and i had to sort them accordingly
This is to help the AI determine whether an object is a fish or not, and along the way it had many great little factoid blurbs that were there in order to help educate students about the impact that trash has on the environment.
After my first bout of sorting, the AI didn’t preform exactly as I had hoped, which was a little disappointing to say the least. But it makes sense considering that AI works better with more data that you provide for it.
Pictured above is all the items it deemed as trash, which still contained fish in it. I found this unacceptable, so I set out to make it have a perfect simulation. And 338 data points entered later, i had finally done it!
Next, it showed that other sea creatures other than fish would also be considered trash by the data points provided, so i went about clicking yet again, hoping for another perfect run
This one included snails, octopus, jellyfish, otters, whales and squid. I forgot to take a snip of the final count that i had for the second portion of this, but i did end up having a perfect simulation, and it only took me 659 data points entered into the machine!
I can see this being a wonderful thing for students to learn, as it teaches about a growing thing in society on two fronts, both through the implementation of AI into current society, but also the growing amount of litter that is in our waterways.
I love the connection between the awareness that there are tons of trash in the ocean and animals. Children are learning a very important concept of helping to keep our oceans clean.
I love this! I can see something like this being a great way to introduce environmental awareness and action into the classroom.
I think the importance of understanding AI is greatly underestimated especially when we are talking about impressionable students. AI is becoming very prominent and will only continue to grow so I believe that it is very important to build a solid basis of understanding how these concepts work. I also agree with the fact that this is a great integration of environmental awareness. It is also amazing how many options there are on hour of code that you can choose from.