All our AI adventures: concrete activities tested as a family, with what worked, what didn't, and what we learned from it.
We played at aiming for a target, adjusting after each throw. Then we talked about how an AI does exactly that: it misses, gets told how it missed, and adjusts. Over and over, until it works.
6-10 yrsWe tried writing a letter between two imaginary characters. Romane chose the flamingo, writing back to Lili the rabbit. Simple enough, until we had to figure out how Lili had written at all, given she has no thumb.
3-7 yrsWe emptied out a random pile of objects and Romane made her own categories: 'small things', 'for building'. Then she did two piles with a secret criterion I couldn't crack. Meryl sorted by what he liked, what he quite liked, and what he didn't like much.
6-10 yrsWe played at crossing out the unimportant words in sentences. Romane got the idea quickly. Until the sentence she refused to touch.
5-8 yrsRomane kept a secret notebook for a week. Then we played at being an AI that looks up its notes instead of relying on memory alone, and discovered that knowing where to look is also a form of intelligence.
3-7 yrsI asked the kids to draw a dog. Romane drew a dog that looked a bit like a cat. Meryl drew a dog that existed mostly in his imagination and named him Charlie. I tried too. I wasn't much better.
6-10 yrsWe played at recalling a trip to Dijon. Then we checked against the photos. Romane remembered a golden owl with feathers and bright eyes. The real owl is worn down, almost invisible. Nobody was lying.
While sorting old photos by resemblance and 'feeling,' Romane discovered how an AI connects memories, not by date, but by what they have in common.
We played at matching images to jobs. Then we flipped the game to spot our own automatic assumptions. AI learns from what humans produce, including their biases.
3-8 yrsWe played at guessing the next word in our bedtime books. Meryl kept saying 'sleep' with Little Wolf, then said 'cuddle' instead of 'wee' and showed me the picture. Romane had her personalised book and found words that could work. AI does the same thing, except it's read far more sentences than us.
3-9 yrsThis blog wasn't planned. It started with a toy that kept giving wrong answers, two kids shouting at it, and a question I couldn't solve: how do you pass on what you've learned, without giving a lecture?