Not satisfied with a four-day Bank Holiday week, I was back in work today for a Scratch Day organised by the inimitable Dale Lane, supported by an all-star cast of IBMers, past and present. The day got off to an ‘exciting’ start with Duncan and I cycling there along Hursley Road. Emma joined us by car, just as the day got going, hot foot from her swimming lesson.
There was a good turnout from IBM and other local families. On offer was a selection of projects from Code Club and Dale’s own Machine Learning for Kids. Emma and Duncan worked separately and I probably spent most of my time helping Duncan (although both are familiar with Scratch from school and home). Typically, Duncan picked two of the ‘advanced’ options but, having heard Dale talk about them at a lunchtime session, I was more than happy to try out a couple of the ML exercises.
We started with Judge a book which performs image classification on book covers to try and identify genre. I was a bit slow to realise that Duncan was logged in to my Amazon account whilst performing his searches but thankfully we switched to an incognito session before getting to the flesh-covered books under Romance! He’d picked Horror and Fantasy as two of his other genres and it wasn’t surprising that the classifier occasionally got those confused.
I had to help out a fair amount with the Headlines exercise as there was a lot of typing to enter the training set from different newspapers. We didn’t manage to finish before the end of the day but we still had an interesting discussion about the differences between tabloid and broadsheet headlines.
The event closed with an opportunity for the children to show what they had done to the others. Although some were a little reticent, this was a great opportunity for them to build a little confidence and soak up the applause that each invariably got.
All-in-all, we had a great day and my thanks go to all those that gave up a day (and more) to help out. We’ll certainly be checking out a few of the other projects and hope that Scratch Day makes a return to Hursley next year.