As you may have gathered by now, the author of this post (yours truly) loves cycling. And since he fears trucks on asphalt more than gravel on uphill roads, the Pohorje mountains were a perfect choice for some unwinding and reflection after the session at the primary school in Mislinja. While pushing the pedals, he also exercised his thoughts.

In Mislinja, we did two school lessons – in both cases, we were classifying typical Slovene houses – and both times, it went perfectly fine. In fact, the students were remarkably successful: typically, during group work, children wrongly classify at least some of the houses, whereas in Mislinja – for the first time ever(!), not one but two groups only misclassified a single house!

However, unlike in our previous experiences with this activity, the part that didn’t go that well was the segment on computers and AI. Not just because the computer misclassified as many as seven houses (I still need to figure out what was different this time compared to the previous times we tried this), but mostly because the discussion would, despite my best efforts, simply not naturally lead to questions such as: “How does the computer recognise the content of images?”, let alone questions like: “Is the computer is intelligent? Can computers actually know anything?”, and so on. I tried to force some of those topics into the conversation in the final minutes of the activity, but it didn’t work, and it also left me feeling inauthentic, like I was showing some boring PowerPoint presentation. I never do this, but it must be a similar feeling.

Takeaways? First of all: the activity requires more time. Second: don’t force it. The Pumice activities are supposed to be fun, without stressing about school curricula and minimum knowledge requirements. If sometimes that means we stay at the level of classifying pictures, so be it. If the students want to discuss what we plan, great. If not, then we’ll discuss something else. Sometimes things just don’t go according to plan. And afterall, there were only five days left for the school year to be over, and many children were already daydreaming of being somewhere else. Me included.

About the house classification activity: we will generalise it to include other subjects, such as architectural periods and sacral buildings of different religions, and teachers will also be able to add more topics, like pictures of clouds if someone feels inspired to do so. In the data entry software, we will add the option that will allow teachers to check, even without using Orange, which group did the best when classifying the images. All these things will come useful when teaching. And AI can be included, if and where it fits.