Data science for children— How to get them started
Two things are going to be critical in the future. Our children and Data Science. So why not give our children a head start with learning Data Science?
There are plenty of buzz words surrounding Data Science:
- Machine Learning
- Data Visualisation
- Big Data
- Data Lakes
- Cloud Computing
This might seem a lot to be trying to teach such a young mind and I am far from suggesting that they learn advanced mathematics, computer programming or the ins and outs of setting up distributed computing systems to run Big Data.
However, children learn and adapt to new concepts and technologies much faster than most adults especially when the content is engaging and intuitive. This is why many children can pick up a tablet and be bypassing the security that their parents thought would stop them from going onto YouTube (personal experience here).
Where to start?
From looking around the internet there is lots of resources and tutorials focusing on teaching adults how to code, build data science pipelines, tell stories with visualisations etc. But there is not much easily found that is focussed on children.
We want content and tools that are easy to use and intuitive for the child to use and learn with and preferably not cost an arm and a leg to gain access to.
Enter Scratch, which is a project of the Scratch Foundation, in collaboration with the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. It is available for free at:
It creators explain Scratch to be:
Scratch is a coding language and online community where you can create your own interactive stories, games, and animations — and share your creations with others around the world.
So as can be seen from the above image there are lots of things that can be programmed using the easy click and drag system. Many schools are currently using this system to teach children basic programming and there is a great community of educators and parents on the website that share what they are doing. I would suggest heading over to website and trying it yourself and have a look at the resources for parents and for educators.
Now we know that children love LEGO® so what if I told you that Scratch allows you to control LEGO® robots? Well you can with LEGO® Mindstorms which provide robot like functionality via a controller that can then be used to make LEGO® robots. More information about this system can be found using the following link:
Now the actual kits are not cheap but lots of schools have at least a basic kit of these robots that they use. You can do some pretty cool stuff with these robot and I have to admit I get a little excited when I get to play with them. The following video showcases one design that can be created.
So far I have shown where you can get started teaching your child how to code using block-code and that it can be integrated into robotics such as LEGO® robots. But I still have not told you how this can be useful for teaching Data Science have I?
What if I told you that Scratch comes with its very own implementation of machine learning which can be used to perform a variety of functions using pre-trained models.
The next website takes the content from Scratch and extends it into the world of machine learning a bit more directly:
One of the nice things on this website is that you can use pre-trained machine learning models to add functionality to the Scratch code to do things like:
- Face detection
- Hand detection
- Hate (or other negative) speech detection
And you can also import pre-trained model from TensorFlow to further expand the capacity of your block-code. This means that there is so much that you can do without actually having to write a single piece of code or worry about hyperparameter tuning. The children and you can just focus on what is important at this stage which is building and nurturing that desire to get a machine to do what ever we want it to do and to learn more.
Where to next?
This is a general introduction into how to teach your child a bit of Data Science/Machine Learning and where to look for resources for you and your school. I am currently working on a few other articles that will examine the concepts and resources outlined in greater detail and will provide links to these as they arise.
I hope you have found the content resourceful and wish you luck.
