This is a free workshop in London aimed at 13-14 year olds but anyone up to the age of 16 is welcome. You will need to bring a laptop in order to take part.
(the teal-coloured registration link is on the left of the info page) 2 July 2024 4.15pm – 7.45pm British Council FREE!
“Address: British Council, 1 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ. Nearest station is Stratford Station (Accessible via Jubilee, Elizabeth, DLR, Central and Overground lines)
Time: 16:15 – 19:45
Are you a teenager interested in the fascinating world of artificial intelligence and coding? Join British Council’s AI experts for an exciting workshop designed to introduce you to the basics of AI, chatbots and programming.
In this event, we’ll recreate a classic arcade game using ChatGPT, a large language model, before putting your pitching skills to the test with the chance to demo your game and win prizes.
No prior experience or knowledge is required – just bring your curiosity and enthusiasm!
Agenda:
4:15-4:30pm – Registration at the British Council reception
4:30-5:15pm – Brief of the task from our instructors, group allocation and introductory exercises (introduction to ChatGPT, Jupyter Notebook interface, Python libraries, how to build/test a game)
5:15-6:00pm – Main task Part 1 (building one of four pre selected game types with the assistance of one instructor per 3 students)
6:00-6:30pm – Refreshment break
6:30-7:00pm – Main task Part 2 (testing game and writing the final pitch)
7:00-7:45pm – Final pitch, demos and prizes (5 mins per group and prizes)
Please note: Minimum age to participate is 13, due to ChatGPT minimum sign-up age.
Please bring your own laptop, as we cannot guarantee we’ll be able to provide one on the day, and may only be able to provide one for a few participants.
Please create your own free ChatGPT account to use during the workshop. An account can be created here.
This event is suitable for 13-14 year olds, however older students are welcome up to the age of 16.“
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EPSRC supports this blog through research grant EP/W033615/1.
Chatbots, knowing where your files are, and winning at noughts and crosses with artificial intelligence.
Welcome to Day 10 of our CS4FN Christmas Computing Advent Calendar. We are just under halfway through our 25 days of posts, one every day between now and Christmas. You can see all our previous posts in the panel with the Christmas tree at the end.
Today’s picture-theme is Holly (and ivy). Let’s see how I manage to link that to computer science 🙂
1. Holly – or Alexa or Siri
In the comedy TV series* Red Dwarf the spaceship has ‘Holly’ an intelligent computer who talks to the crew and answers their questions. Star Trek also has ‘Computer’ who can have quite technical conversations and give reports on the health of the ship and crew.
People are now quite familiar with talking to computers, or at least giving them commands. You might have heard of Alexa (Amazon) or Siri (Apple / iPhone) and you might even have talked to one of these virtual assistants yourself.
When this article (below) was written people were much less familiar with them. How can they know all the answers to people’s questions and why do they seem to have an intelligence?
Read the article and then play a game (see 3. Today’s Puzzle) to see if you think a piece of paper can be intelligent.
Meet the Chatterbots – talking to computers thanks to artificial intelligence and virtual assistants
*also a book!
2. Are you a filing cabinet or a laundry basket?
People have different ways of saving information on their computers. Some university teachers found that when they asked their students to open a file from a particular directory their students were completely puzzled. It turned out that the (younger) students didn’t think about files and where to put them in the same way that their (older) teachers did, and the reason is partly the type of device teachers and students grew up with.
Older people grew up using computers where the best way to organise things was to save a file in a particular folder to make it easy to find it again. Sometimes there would be several folders. For example you might have a main folder for Homework, then a year folder for 2021, then folders inside for each month. In the December folder you’d put your december.doc file. The file has a file name (december.doc) and an ‘address’ (Homework/2021/December/). Pretty similar to the link to this blog post which also uses the / symbol to separate all the posts made in 2021, then December, then today.
Files and folders image by Ulrike Mai from Pixabay. Each brown folder contains files, and is itself contained in the drawer, and the drawer is contained in the cabinet.
To find your december.doc file again you’d just open each folder by following that path: first Homework, then 2021, then December – and there’s your file. It’s a bit like looking for a pair of socks in your house – first you need to open your front door and go into your home, then open your bedroom door, then open the sock drawer and there are your socks.
What your file and folder structure might look like.
Younger people have grown up with devices that make it easy to search for any file. It doesn’t really matter where the file is so people used to these devices have never really needed to think about a file’s location. People can search for the file by name, by some words that are in the file, or the date range for when it was created, even the type of file. So many options.
The first way, that the teachers were using, is like a filing cabinet in an office, with documents neatly packed away in folders within folders. The second way is a bit more like a laundry basket where your socks might be all over the house but you can easily find the pair you want by typing ‘blue socks’ into the search bar.
Which way do you use?
In most cases either is fine and you can just choose whichever way of searching or finding their files that works for you. If you’re learning programming though it can be really helpful to know a bit about file paths because the code you’re creating might need to know exactly where a file is, so that it can read from it. So now some university teachers on STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) and computing courses are also teaching their students how to use the filing cabinet method. It could be useful for them in their future careers.
As the author says “Many consumer devices try to conceal the underlying file system from the user (for example, smart phones and some tablet computers). Graphical interfaces, applications, and even search have all made it possible for people to use these devices without being concerned with file systems. When you study Computer Science, you must look behind these interfaces.”
You might be wondering what any of this has to do with ivy. Well, whenever I’ve seen a real folder structure on a Windows computer (you can see one here) I’ve often thought it looked a bit like ivy 😉
Print or write out the instructions on page 5 of the PDF and challenge someone to a game of noughts and crosses… (there’s a good chance the bit of paper will win).
The trick is based on a very old puzzle at least one early version of which was by Sam Lloyd. See this selection of vanishing puzzles for some variations. A very simple version of it appears in the Moscow Puzzles (puzzle 305) by Boris A. Kordemsky where a line is made to disappear.
In the picture above five medium-length lines become four longer lines. It looks like a line has disappeared but its length has just been spread among the other lines, lengthening them.
If you’d like to have a go at drawing your own disappearing puzzle have a look here.
Royal Institution, Prof Michael Wooldridge in the Faraday Lecture Theatre – photo credit: Paul Wilkinson
Every year two things happen in December: (1) someone gives a series of Christmas Lectures for young people at the Royal Institution in central London which the BBC film… and then (2) the programme is broadcast on telly over the Christmas holidays.
This year there’s an extra bit!
You can come and watch a livestream of the lectures being filmed in one of 20 venues around the UK and QMUL is one of those venues.
Thanks to a videolink from the Faraday Lecture Theatre in the Royal Institution we’ll be streaming the lectures as they are taking place, just a few miles away.
The Truth About AI
This year Prof Mike Wooldridge will be giving the series of lectues on artificial intelligence, definitely a hot topic!
We have FREE tickets for you and your family, school, scouts group, community group to come along and watch. You can attend one, two or all three talks if you like (but you don’t need to have attended an earlier talk to enjoy a later one). Tell your friends 🙂 We have a maximum of 100 spaces for each of the three livestreaming events.
When?
Tuesday 12th December (6pm – 8.30pm, doors 5.30pm)
Thursday 14th December (as above)
Saturday 16th December (as above)
Each talk itself is probably more like an hour long but because demos need to be re-set and things might need to be filmed from a different angle there will be some stopping and re-starting. We’ll have some activities to do during the breaks in recording.
Where?
We’ll be in Room ‘PP1’ at the People’s Palace on Mile End Road. It’s slightly nearer Stepney Green station than Mile End station and is on the 25 and 205 bus routes. It’s also wheelchair accessible (including loos). [Map link]
Who’s it for?
The lectures are aimed at 11-17 year olds but we’re looking forward to welcoming younger and older siblings.
Tickets
Our tickets at the People’s Palace are free, click or tap these links to secure your place. Please note that everyone in your group will need their own ticket for each event.
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