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!

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:

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:

A kid has to know his Arduino: how to take baby steps towards cyber-physical systems

This time the suggestion came from my wife: She came across Arduino systems in the school she’s been teaching, and suggested that I and our 10-year-old tackle Arduino-related projects. I ordered an Arduino starter kit that’s based on Arduino Uno microcontroller board and we took our first steps towards building cyber-physical systems.

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The starter kit seems self-contained and the book is very informative. It would be good if there were Dutch translation, too, but so far it’s good enough for our practical goals. We’ve tried the first example, and as a time-honored tradition uploaded our first program that blinks an embedded LED light, changing the duration and experimenting with it. Step 1, Arduino version of “Hello, world!” accomplished! 🙂

I guess it will be a bit challenging for me to explain Ohm’s law and some of the electronic components. On top of that, I’ll have to explain him the basics of Arduino (C++) language. Having a lot of example projects in the book that came with the starter kit, in addition to lots of examples that’s part of freely available Arduino IDE will definitely help in that regard. I can imagine that there will be some confusion because of his previous exposure to Python, but we’ll see how it goes.

As 2021 comes to an end, I’m looking forward to teaching more about programming and electronics to my sons in 2022.

Move 37: A kid has to know his AlphaGo Zero and Hawking radiation temperature

I and my 10-year-old attended a fantastic theater performance on the evening of 11th December, 2021, Saturday. Actor and director Thomas Ryckewaert’s collaboration with Prof. Dr. Thomas Hertog turned out to be a unique experience for us, well beyond our expectations: “Move 37” was a delight for our eyes, ears, and minds!

How can a child start with computer music? How about EarSketch?

There are a myriad of ways to use computer programming to produce music. I’ve recently discovered “EarSketch“, a web-based computer music programming environment: https://earsketch.gatech.edu

According to Wikipedia: “EarSketch is a free educational programming environment. Its core purpose is to teach coding in two widely used languages, Python and JavaScript, through music composing and remixing. This learning environment was developed first at Georgia Institute of Technology (from 2011) under Prof. Jason Freeman (School of Music) and Prof. Brian Magerko (School of Literature, Media, and Communication). EarSketch is web-based, which means users can access it with their web-browsers, and with no installation. No account is required to create projects or view existing projects. EarSketch comprises different elements: a curriculum, a digital audio workstation (or DAW), a code editor and console, and a sound browser. EarSketch’s sound library was created by Young Guru, Jay Z’s sound engineer, and famous sound designer Richard Devine.”

After reading a recent article in Communications of ACM, titled “EarSketch: Engaging Broad Populations in Computing Through Music“, and watching the accompanying video, I decided to give it a try for my 10-year-old son.

Because I already started to teach him Python programming, I was happy to see that EarSketch supported Python in addition to JavaScript. Not being forced to install yet another application and having everything in the web browser made it super convenient. So far I’m happy to see my 10-year-old being super enthusiastic about EarSketch. After my initial introduction, he pushed me to teach him more about the system and started to create some crazy mix of music! 🙂

One of the strong points of EarSketch system is the curriculum embedded in the web application. It’s a pity that it’s not yet translated to Dutch but having crystal clear videos, in addition to tons of gradually progressive code and music examples help a lot.

Visiting Historical Centre Air Base Brustem

During the second week of August, 2021, we spent the weekend at Het Landsleven in Gingelom. Being only a few kilometers from the historical center of Sint-Truiden (south of Limburg), we decided to pay a visit to “Historical Centre Air Base Brustem“.

On a relatively hot Saturday afternoon, we were lucky that the museum didn’t have many visitors: the kids had a very special guided tour, with a very nice selection of aircraft posters.

If you are interested in the history of World War II and military aviation, you’ll spend a good few hours in this nice little museum.

For those into the history of jazz and cultural influence of USA in Europe, the museum has also some material about the “Nix Compris” jazz band, made up of military personnel stationed at this air base in Belgium, back in 1944 and 1945.

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Roblox and Quantum Mechanics

The year is 2021 and this Roblox thingy is getting a bit out of control, err… I mean too much science! 🙂

Of course, I’m all for science, and support the curiosity of my 10-year-old. But…

How complex are game programs?

Two months ago, I decided to demonstrate to my son a few things about software programming, games and the effort/complexity behind the scenes. I had already showed him how to create very simple programs using Scratch, and nowadays I try to guide him with the help of a book titled “Programmeren voor kinderen – Python“.

My son is a Minecraft and Roblox enthusiast, and he asked me what it takes to create such programs from scratch. I told him maybe we should take a look at the internals of some existing games; after all, this is what I’ve done when I was almost his age: I and my friends read the source code of games designed for computers such as Commodore 64, Sinclair Spectrum ZX 48K, etc., and tried to modify them to our liking. As usual, Python and PyGame to the rescue!

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