As an intro, I'd ask the students for examples/non-examples of AI, and what problems they might be aware of with its use. Another possible intro would be to play a song, have students rate the song 1-100 (hate/like), then list a certain # of characteristics the song has. They can then match those to other songs with the same characteristics and try to sort out the relevant weights the characteristics should have to predict whether the listener would rate the new song the same way (is this how Pandora works?) to get across the idea of factoring in multiple characteristics with different weights to meet a threshold.
The activities that came to mind quickly (for high school students in CS class) were:
1. have students work out the "Missionaries & Cannibals" problem (in groups, where one student is recording their thinking) and then write out the solution in pseudo-code (and as an extension write a pseudo-code symbolic logic code that a machine could solve itself)
2. Have students hand-write a number (like 8) on graph paper (with some rules to make them close to the same size) and then replicate the process of comparing with others and determining which pixels need to have the most weight and what the threshold should be to determine whether another example is/is not an 8. Since many students don't like using negative numbers (or fractions, or decimals), is there a way to do this simply by giving the pixels values 0-9 (and obviously setting a high threshold)?
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As an intro, I'd ask the students for examples/non-examples of AI, and what problems they might be aware of with its use. Another possible intro would be to play a song, have students rate the song 1-100 (hate/like), then list a certain # of characteristics the song has. They can then match those to other songs with the same characteristics and try to sort out the relevant weights the characteristics should have to predict whether the listener would rate the new song the same way (is this how Pandora works?) to get across the idea of factoring in multiple characteristics with different weights to meet a threshold.
The activities that came to mind quickly (for high school students in CS class) were:
1. have students work out the "Missionaries & Cannibals" problem (in groups, where one student is recording their thinking) and then write out the solution in pseudo-code (and as an extension write a pseudo-code symbolic logic code that a machine could solve itself)
2. Have students hand-write a number (like 8) on graph paper (with some rules to make them close to the same size) and then replicate the process of comparing with others and determining which pixels need to have the most weight and what the threshold should be to determine whether another example is/is not an 8. Since many students don't like using negative numbers (or fractions, or decimals), is there a way to do this simply by giving the pixels values 0-9 (and obviously setting a high threshold)?