As Dale writes on his website, he’s a father of two exhausting kids, a software developer for IBM in the UK, a mobile and gadget obsessive, a charity trustee and an all-round geek. Dale is with IBM for more than 16 years now. During his career, he came across many of IBM’s Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning offerings, such as IBM Watson. While his work at IBM most definitely prepared him to build something like Machine Learning for Kids, this educational offering was built entirely in his free time.
So what exactly is Machine Learning for Kids? It allows kids to train their own machine learning models to recognise text, numbers, images, or sounds. Just years ago this was only possible for developers with specialized knowledge – making this learning available to kids is absolutely phenomenal. The trained models can later be used in Scratch, which then combines Machine Learning with visual, block-based coding. After integrating with Scratch, Kids can simply drag visual code blocks into the editor to make use of the machine learning models.
Machine Learning for Kids started as a coding tool that Dale created for local schools near his home in the UK and now has turned into one of the most used IBM Activity Kits ever. In 2018, Dale was awarded the IBM Volunteer Excellence Award—the highest form of volunteer recognition given by the company.
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]]>Foremost, there is Scratch – a block-based visual programming language and online community targeted primarily at children. We have mentioned Scratch many times and finally we’re talking with Eric, wo is currently working with the Scratch Team at MIT Media Lab.
Another great educational toy that Eric was involved with is Makey Makey. It’s is an electronic invention tool and toy that allows users to connect everyday objects to computer programs. Using a circuit board, alligator clips, and a USB cable, the toy uses closed loop electrical signals to send the computer either a keyboard stroke or mouse click signal. This simply means, that you can hook up a banana to your computer – whenever you touch it, it sends a keystroke – and you can for example control a fun game with it. Crazy? Yep, but a great way to start learning about electricity, computers and electronics.
Images showing the use of Makey Makey during workshops at MIT.
Images by Eric Rosenbaum, CC-BY 2.0 – way more here…
Eric has also been involved in electronics projects such as Drawdio – the name combines drawing with audio and if you solder and build it with your kids, you can have fun and learn about electronics in combination with sound at the same time. Or there is singing fingers, which is an iPad app that allows you to experiment with sound.
We could continue listing projects for quite some time – so if you’re interested please check out the shownote links below.
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]]>Jens is not just the Lead developer of Snap!, but also a researcher at SAP and a Lawyer – quite an interesting combination 
Together with Brian Harvey from the University of California in Berkeley, he developed this visual programming language.
Snap! is a visual programming language – typically you’d now think of a toy/childish programming language that is very limited in what you can do with it – but Snap! is also used for a serious introduction into programming.
For example, it has been used to teach “The Beauty and Joy of Computing” – an introductory course in computer science at the University of California in Berkeley.
Scratch is another block-based visual programming language that Snap! has been inspired by a lot. Just like Snap!, it is used primarily by kids to create stories, games and animations that can then easily be shared with the community. One of the key differences to Snap! is that Scratch is missing some of the advanced programming concepts, which is why many people advocate to start with Scratch or even Scratch Junior (which targets Kids between 5 and 7 years) and later switch to Snap! for the more advanced features.
Coming back to Snap!, the main site to get started is https://snap.berkeley.edu/ which is where you find the web-based editor and also forums as well as the published Snap! Projects of others
Feature Image: By University of California, Berkeley – https://snap.berkeley.edu/ (Licencing here), AGPL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70676447