Innovation

“Green Eggs & A.I.” (🔗)

Data from Dr Seuss’ story was used to build a model to generate a sentence that sounds like it belongs in the book “Green Eggs and Ham”. A sentence is constructed word by word randomly drawing a card from a deck, then using that new word’s deck to draw the next word, and repeating these actions until the sentence ends.

This model is a n=1 Markov Chain.

“Spicy Marshmallow” (🔗)

This is a simple number game for 2 players. After playing the game a couple of times, an ‘AI’ of cups and candies can be made and played against. This probabilistic AI is entirely made of physical items. As the lesson progresses the AI opponent learns and gets better with every game it plays. The AI’s choices change as this improvement occurs.

High School Activity / Middle School Activity

Python Turtle in Colab (🔗)

The Python turtle library provides a simple way to create graphics and drawings by controlling a virtual “turtle” that moves on the screen. I have adapted it to work in Google’s Colaboratory tool.

VEX V5 Bluetooth Communication (🔗)

The VEX V5 Brain has the ability to communicate with other Bluetooth LE devices by adding the Radio. Here is how to establish a two-way communication channel.

Colab ipynb Import (🔗)

Remote, in-memory import of Python (.py) & Jupyter notebook files (.ipynb) from Google Drive. This allows code to be split across multiple notebooks to modularize projects.

VNCThumbnailViewer (🔗)

Back in the 2000s, I created a tool for observing a classroom full of computers from the single teacher station. It garnered over 10,000 installs. Nowadays, this capability is built-in to many other more advanced ed tech software packages.