DALI4US is an Erasmus project with a similar theme to Pumice, involving not only Slovenian teachers but also teachers from Ireland and Luxembourg. On 19 October, we held a pilot workshop in Luxembourg for Luxembourg teachers teaching in upper primary school.

We started by getting on a tram and going to a nearby park where we collected different types of leaves - some birch, some maple, some beech, etc. In the classroom, we split into groups and sorted the leaves by shape, thinking about how their students would approach the task. Each group worked in their own way - probably as each group of students would work in their own way.

The idea was to introduce the idea of clustering to the pupils - sorry, teachers. Specifically, hierarchical clustering, as we first divided the leaves into two groups, then two groups into even smaller groups, and so on, until they felt that each group was sufficiently unified.

Then they photographed the leabes, loaded the photos into Orange and a similar process of clustering was carried out with Orange. We then told them a bit about how clustering works, how deep neural networks embed images, and how we can treat images of houses or clouds in the same way as tree leaves.

The primary aim of the workshop was to get feedback from teachers: how do they like the approach, do they find it suitable for schools, do they feel sufficiently qualified, what help would they need, etc.

The result? Teachers liked especially the first part, without the computer. They found Orange overwhelming; I think they were intimidated mainly by the large number of options that they don’t actually need. A useful food for thought.