Q: What happens when you relax some of the requirements of an assignment and give students more freedom to express their understanding of a topic?
A: Students produce excellent work in a variety of different formats.
Read on…
During my ongoing AI course at FAU I asked students to prepare a summary of Sean Gerrish’s book “How smart machines think”. The book covers a wide range of topics, such as: self-driving cars, Netflix recommendations, IBM’s Watson, and video game-playing computer programs.
There were two twists, though:
- They could choose ‘breadth’ (a summary of the whole book or some of its parts/chapters) or ‘depth’ (choosing a topic — say, self-driving cars — and going more deeply into it).
- They were encouraged to stay away from the ‘essay’ / ‘scientific paper’ format. I encouraged them to try other formats, from PPT to videos to websites.
The results were amazing!
Here are some examples (in no particular order):
- Vinh Huynh, Tyler Smith, and Lars Koester created a rich website focused on the Second DARPA Grand Challenge — one of the crucial events in the development of self-driving vehicles.
- Cameron Hernandez and Kevin Anderson wrote a blog post on self-driving vehicles (“Failure: Fuel for the Future”).
- Michael Keller, Yuri Villanueva, and Henry Herzfeld used JavaScript and Tensorflow.js to implement a Deep-Q reinforcement learning based game of Connect Four (code on GitHub).
- Maggie Elkin leveraged her background in neuroscience (where she’d studied classical and operant conditioning in rats) and prepared a very rich PPT with embedded videos on the psychology behind reinforcement learning.
- Adam Corbin shared his knowledge via LinkedIn article on “StarCraft & Real-Time Al”
- Jenny Craig (LinkedIn/ Facebook / Twitter: @JamieCraigMusic) leveraged her background in music and her ongoing PhD research on self-driving cars to produce a remarkably well-produced podcast on autonomous vehicles.
- Priya Sigler wrote a blog post on “Neural Networks and Memory”.
- Zuber Najam wrote a blog post on the DARPA Challenges
- Robert Gerdung created a short video lecture on IBM Watson.
- Ryan Harper created a richly illustrated PPT with embedded videos on the history of automata robots.
- Marco Tacca produced a great video on “Real-Time AI and StarCraft”
- Emily Stark and Michael Teti devised an amazingly creative debate between them (Resolution: “The architecture which drove Boss in the DARPA Urban Self-Driving Challenge contained modules which qualify Boss of having consciousness.”), reported the results in this document, and asked me to declare a winner (without knowing who was PRO or CON). Fascinating!
I am extremely proud of my students’ work and look forward to sharing additional brilliant examples before the end of the term — COVID-19 disruptions notwithstanding.
Featured image credit: “My Life Through A Lens”