Teaching 3 year olds about Technology Consulting

Last month, my daughter Morgan’s preschool started encouraging parents to come into the classroom to talk about their occupation. Given that it was October, the first 3 people were all in the medical field, and they told the kids about bones and made skeleton crafts.

I decided last week to change the pace by going in to explain my job as a technology consultant, but I really had no idea how I was going to explain that to a group of 3 year olds. If you were to ask my daughter what I do, she’d say “Mommy fixes bones, daddy fixes computers”. (Note: this is pretty much what my parents, old college roommate, and brothers thinks I do too, which is why they always call when they have any sort of computer problem). To avoid adding all these kids families to the list of tech support callers, I had to find a way to teach kids about computers, programming, and machine learning. Additionally, because the school uses the Montessori method, I wanted to avoid using screens as much as possible. What I discovered over the next week as I planned and gave the talk was eye opening, thought provoking, and exhilarating.

After a fair bit of thought, I distilled what kids need to know about my profession to 3 questions to answer:

1. What is a computer?
2. How do people teach computers to do things we want them to do?
3. How do I teach people how to teach computers to do the things they want?

I’m really interested to hear how you would these questions for young children.

What is a computer?

It’s a special kind of machine that is really good at doing what someone taught it to do the same way over and over again. People can teach the computer new things too. People can also connect things to the computer to let it interact with people and other things. At its core, a computer stores a bunch of 0s and 1s that tell it what to do. I decided to use a simple craft based activity to show the kids how to count in Binary. They each made a poster with either 1, 2, or 4 pumpkins, and then we had groups of 3 kids stand up and turn around to make each number between 1 and 7. Then they made a craft pumpkin patch by drawing on the background.

How do people teach computers to do things we want them to?

There are now 2 ways to do this: Programming & Machine Learning.

First, we could write a program, which is a series of instructions that tell the computer what to do. People have taught the computer how to take a special set of words called a programming language and turn them into 0s and 1s so the computer can remember the instructions. I decided to use a much more complex activity using a physical representation of Sorting Networks to show the kids how a computer would do the Brown Stairs activity to explain this concept. Each student moved down the lines, and every time they met, the one with the larger stair moved to the right, and the smaller one went left. At the end, no matter what order they started in, the stairs were sorted from largest to smallest.

A Sorting Network from CS Unplugged, to do the Montessori Brown Stairs, drawn in painter’s tape. Morgan is on the far left.

Second, we can use a special kind of program to let the computer learn in a similar way as a child. We call this second way machine learning. With machine learning, we just show the computer something, and tell it what we want it to do the next time it sees that thing. Eventually, the computer learns what we want it to do even if it hasn’t seen the thing we are showing it. I used a DeepLens camera from Amazon, and built an example based on the Doorman submission to the DeepLens challenge. In this case, each kid would walk up and the camera wouldn’t recognize them. After I told the computer who they were, they could walk up again, and it would say their name and guess how they were feeling based on facial recognition. More on that in another post.

The kids taking turns letting the computer learn who they are using Machine Learning (Amazon Deep Lens & AWS Rekognition under the hood)

How do I teach people how to teach computers to do the things they want?

I’ve been teaching computers by writing programs and using machine learning for a while, but now I mainly teach people so they can teach computers. I show my co-workers how to write programs to do. I draw pictures that show people what to put in the programs. I help people think about what they might want their computers to do. For this, I decided to read Rosie Revere, Engineer by Andrea Beaty to the kids to teach the critical skills of perseverance and creativity. I also got to teach them the lesson personally, as I couldn’t get the DeepLens to connect to wifi on the first day, so I had to come back the next day to do that activity (note the different clothes they’re all wearing in the picture above).

Reading Rosie Revere to my daughter’s classroom. It’s a great book that covers perseverance, creativity, and that imperfect solutions are often the best.

There are lots of other resources out there for teaching kids about computer science or data science. If you’re interested in exploring some of these activities further, you can find the CS Unplugged materials here (as you’ll see on there, the materials are usually geared towards 5+, but you adapt them to work for younger kids). A few that I think would be possible are Sorting Algorithms, others on Sorting Networks, and Error Correction. Additionally, there are materials that have been built specifically for teaching computer science skills in the Montessori way. Examples are Cubeto and Learning Beautiful.

If you’re a software engineer, data scientist, or any kind of consultant, and you have kids, let me know how you teach your kids about what you do.