On 23.08.2022, 14 children aged between eight and twelve visited ScaDS.AI in Leipzig as part of the Ferienpass Leipzig program during school holidays. Together with Helliwood e. V. three workshops were offered at the Living Lab, in which the use of artificial intelligence could be playfully tested with the help of interactively designed animations and applications. One workshop was offered by the researchers of ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig, the other two were supervised by the team of Helliwood.

With the help of the Turtle Coding Box, an inclusive learning package for children, the young researchers worked together on small programming tasks. For example, the children used Google’s Teachable Machine application to train a Neural Network to recognize three types of fruits: They checked whether the training was successful by holding bananas and apples up to the computer’s camera. There was great joy when the trained Neural Network recognized the right fruits reliably.

During the Ferienpass Leipzig workshop, the children showed a lot of inquisitiveness, motivation and creativity. For the researchers of ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig, this encounter was a welcome change from their daily research routine. The adults also visibly enjoyed answering the many questions and supporting the young programmers in solving the tasks.