A kid has to start with Bach

On 26th of April, 2024, Friday evening, I and my wife attended a concert given by the piano students of Academie Wilrijk. We were excited because our 12-year-old son was among those piano students, and this was his first concert in a church, in front of about 100 people. It was also the first time we visited Saint Bavo Church in Wilrijk. Being surrounded by history, and superb acoustics of this beautiful church, we enjoyed a fantastic evening. I must also say that our son’s participation owes a lot to the encouragement, approval, and strong guidance of his piano teacher, Raphael Becker.

Kids have to know the history of their musical instruments

Almost 15 years after my first visit to MIM (Musical Instruments Museum) in Brussels, I had the opportunity for a revisit, this time as a father (you can find what I wrote (in Turkish) about my first visit in my other blog).

This museum visit coincided with my 6-year-old’s first train experience, and together with my 12-year-old, we had a fantastic train journey from Antwerpen-Centraal to Brussels-Central.

I expected my older son to be interested in the history of musical instruments, particularly the keyboards because of his piano studies, but my 6-year-old turned out to be even more enthusiastic than his brother, especially after I described to him that he can look at the little plates with numbers, enter those digits into to the digital guide hanging on his neck and enjoy the fantastic sound recordings of those instruments via the earphones (“Dad, can we buy this digital guide, there’s so much music in it, I like it!” :)). I found the whole experience exhilarating: seeing my kids going from one instrument to the other, listening, reading, asking questions, and making comments.

A kid has to know some AI-powered animation technology and have fun

Recently the primary school teacher of my 6-year-old shared some lovely animations from their class. The web addresses at https://sketch.metademolab.com/ immediately rang a bell, and I remembered that some months ago I came across some super interesting animation technology developed as an open source project by Meta AI Research engineers, a system that lets you easily animate a static drawing such as the following animation:

According to the demo web site: “Children’s drawings have a wonderful inventiveness, energy, and variety. We focus on the consequence of all that variety in their drawings of human figures as we develop an algorithm to bring them to life through automatic animation.”

“This demo builds upon Detectron2 and AlphaPose. Motion capture data comes from the CMU Graphics Motion Capture Lab and Mixamo.”

“The “Animated Drawings” Demo allows parents and guardians to convert two-dimensional children’s’ drawings into fun animations.”

The amount of computer vision and machine learning technology know-how & expertise behind this super simple looking demonstration is impressive to say the least. And I consider my 6-year-old and his friends lucky because of having such a teacher and a school, so that they get to experience the fruits of cutting edge research and development. The kids of course aren’t aware of the immense knowledge behind this system that they had fun playing with, but who knows, maybe some of them will grow up to contribute to even more advanced systems in about 20 years. One thing for sure: we’re living in super interesting times in terms of technological progress!

A kid has to know his other Manneken Pis

If you’ve ever been to Brussels, Belgium, you probably came across one of its most iconic landmarks, known as “Manneken Pis” (Dutch for ‘Little Pissing Man’). But did you know about the other “Manneken Pis” statue located in the small town of Geraardsbergen?

I recently discovered this small town and its famous statue, and finally had the opportunity to visit with my then 5-year-old. Geraardsbergen is one of the oldest cities in Belgium. It came into  existence close to the settlement of Hunnegem and in 1068 was one of the  first communities in Western Europe to be granted city status.

A kid has to know his World War II history

A few months ago, we stayed at the small Belgian city of Houffalize for a few days. Apart from its great scenery, delicious food, and nice people, I will always remember this place within the context of World War II, because of the role it played during the brutal Battle of the Bulge, also known as the Ardennes Offensive, “the last major German offensive campaign on the Western Front during World War II. The battle lasted for five weeks from 16 December 1944 to 28 January 1945, towards the end of the war in Europe. It was launched through the densely forested Ardennes region between Belgium and Luxembourg. It overlapped with the Alsace Offensive, subsequently the Colmar Pocket, another series of battles launched by the Germans in support of the Ardennes thrust.”

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

As my 5-year-old son enthusiastically went around an old Panther tank (ordnance inventory designation: Sd.Kfz. 171), and later around some other war relics, I couldn’t help myself but to think about the kids that lived through the brutal and horrible winter more than 70 years ago. The ones that survived should be more than 80 years of age by now, and I wondered if any of them were still alive, if they remembered those days. Wherever we turned, we came across signs and memorials dedicated to the victims of war, that lead to silent echoes, contrasting with the beautiful and lovely scenery of the town, as well as green hills surrounding it.

To this day, I pray for my and other children not to endure the cruelty of war, knowing very well that this action doesn’t amount to anything for the innocent ones that continue to live through the horrors of war. My children had been very lucky so far, and many others not so much at all, having paid and still paying the price of the actions conducted by people they had no control over.

Machine Learning for Kids : A Project-Based Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

Thanks to a webinar hosted by IBM and titled “Enhancing school curriculum to prepare our children for an “AI-first” future” (presented by Dale Lane), I’ve recently learned about an interesting educational system for teaching kids about machine learning, and the accompanying book “Machine Learning for Kids : A Project-Based Introduction to Artificial Intelligence“.

According to the web site “Machine Learning for Kids“, “this free tool introduces machine learning by providing hands-on experiences for training machine learning systems and building things with them. It provides an easy-to-use guided environment for training machine learning models to recognize text, numbers, images, or sounds. This builds on existing efforts to introduce and teach coding to children, by adding these models to educational coding platforms Scratch and App Inventor, and helping children create projects and build games with the machine learning models they train.”

I’m glad to see that the web site is available in many languages, including Dutch, so that I can easily share it with my children and their friends in Belgium:

A kid has to know his radio telescope inside out

It’s been about 5 years since our first close encounter with a radio telescope, described in “A kid has to know his radio telescope“. Back in 2017, my older son was about 6 years old, and we didn’t have the opportunity to see the interior of the that radio telescope in Germany.

A view from an old building at the site

Fast forward to August, 2022, and I learned that Dwingeloo Radio Observatory in the Netherlands was open to public on some days, and we only had to make a reservation by paying a small fee. Needless to say, knowing myself and my 11-year-old son, I jumped at the opportunity. Finally we set on our way on a very sunny, warm Saturday afternoon (20th of August). Dwingeloo is almost 300 km (about 3 hour by car) from where we live in Belgium, therefore we decided to spend the night at a nearby hotel, and go there Sunday noon. Everything went as planned, and we were lucky to have another sunny day, around 25°C:

A kid has to know MUSEOS Natural History Museum

I consider ourselves lucky to have accidentally discovered a fascinating little museum in the small coastal town of Koksijde, Belgium: https://museos2015.wordpress.com.

“MUSEOS Natural History Museum“, a small, private museum is the work of two passionate biologists, Luc Tyteca and Leentje Vandenhoudt. I and my 5-year-old spent almost 2 hours in this nice museum having lovely conversations triggered by all those skeletons and remains.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

I hope the museum will grow its very interesting collection, and continue to inspire children as well as adults in the years to come.

There’s also a nice video (in Dutch) by the owners of the museum:

Belgium and mathematics education: is it alarming?

During the first week of June, 2022, there was some news about the level of mathematics education in Belgium (in the Dutch-speaking Flemish region): “Twelve-year-olds score worse for mathematics and ICT, Education Minister Weyts: “Results are alarming”. You can read the automatic English translation of the VRT news yourself.

According to the news, compared to 2016 and 2009, the 12-year-old students have a worse performance in mathematics, as well as ICT skills. As a father of two boys, aged 4.5 and 11, I’m a little concerned. I don’t know if there’s an easy, magical way out of this, but I hope decision makers at the ministry of education will have a long-term strategy based on good feedback from the experts, teachers and school administrators.

In the same article it says: “Pupils with a school disadvantage, students with dyslexia or dyscalculia and students who receive extra care do worse for mathematics. Boys, students who only speak Dutch at home, students with a higher socioeconomic status and children of parents who have a positive attitude towards of math, then do it better.”

The last two years, especially (relatively) short periods of school lock-downs (because of COVID-19) made me realize how big of an equalizer the school is. Not every student has a family and environment conducive to educational support, and yet, these young brains should be considered the treasure of the country’s future. Not all of those students will have great talent and capacity, of course, but we must make sure that the major reason of their educational outcome is mostly tied to their inherent, intrinsic properties (how to measure this, is, of course, a topic of another, rather hot debate). Having said that, we owe it to those students and ourselves to push the average level as far as possible, and definitely not lead to regress.

Should we let kids play computer games as much as they want?

The phrase “screen time” continues to occupy the minds of many parents: thinking about the human evolution, the case of toddlers and teenagers spending hours in front of a computer, tablet, etc. is a very modern development, and we still don’t know how exactly the various forms of digital interaction affect the minds of our children.

A recent news article brought this topic to my attention again: “Children who play more video games show greater gains in intelligence over time, study finds” (originally published at https://theconversation.com/video-games-our-study-suggests-they-boost-intelligence-in-children-182950).

I think I’ll have to learn more about the following points raised in that article: