LittleAIMaster Activity Pack

Machine Learning for Elementary Students

ages 6–11, roughly grades 1–5 · 3 activities · about 20 minutes each

Print this and work through one activity at a time. Each one ends with something you can check, so you can tell whether the idea actually landed rather than guessing.

1. Sorting game with no computer

Ages 3–7 · about 15 minutes

You need: A pile of buttons, blocks, or socks

  1. Sort the pile into two groups without saying the rule out loud.
  2. Let the child guess the rule you used.
  3. Swap roles — the child sorts, you guess.
  4. Add one object that does not fit either group and talk about what to do with it.
It worked if: The child can explain that you were following a rule, and that a rule can be guessed from examples alone.

What went wrong / what surprised us:

2. Train a rock-paper-scissors classifier

Ages 7–14 · about 30 minutes

You need: A laptop with a webcam, Teachable Machine

  1. Create three classes: rock, paper, scissors.
  2. Record about thirty webcam samples of each hand shape.
  3. Train the model and test it live.
  4. Now test it with the child's other hand, or in a darker corner of the room, and note where it breaks.
  5. Add samples covering those failures and retrain.
It worked if: The child can say why the model failed on the untrained hand — the examples did not cover that case.

What went wrong / what surprised us:

3. Deliberately bias a model, then fix it

Ages 10–18 · about 45 minutes

You need: A laptop with a webcam, Teachable Machine

  1. Train a two-class model using samples of only one person.
  2. Test it on a second person and record how much accuracy drops.
  3. Write down a prediction for why before changing anything.
  4. Retrain including the second person and measure the difference.
It worked if: The child can connect an unrepresentative training set to a specific real-world harm, using their own measurement as evidence.

What went wrong / what surprised us:

A note on tools: everything recommended for ages 6–11, roughly grades 1–5 is free and runs in a browser. If a product asks you to pay before your child can finish an activity, there is almost always a free equivalent.

littleaimaster.com · Machine Learning for Elementary Students

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