Silicon Valley parents are sending their kids to AI summer camps:
“Either they set expectations too high or too low,” [CEO] Du said of the parents. As an example, she recounted a confounding comment in a feedback survey from the parent of a 5-year-old.
“After one week, the parent said, ‘My child did not learn much. My cousin is a Google engineer, and he said he’s not ready to be an intern at Google yet.’ What do I say to that review?” Du said, bemused.
Ruining the delightful ending of the piece here:
After a few 30-minute breaks and an hourlong lunch — during which many of the AI workforce-in-training ran to the play set outside — a handful of the dialed-in students continued designing games on their laptops.
But more found their attention waning and pivoted to drawing, crawling around the floor and climbing on top of desks.
One kid searched “sharks butt” into the game design tool’s image gallery. Disappointingly, there were no results.
(via Assaf)
Me on Mastodon a couple of months ago:
Just restumbled upon daniel.industries/mcu-pd-2017 and remembering how great that experience was. Microsoft has enshittified Minecraft since, driving away the community of innovative tinkerers in favor of more lucrative young consumers on closed platforms. We’ve had to adjust our Minecraft U offerings and remove all the coding elements. This might be our last year.
As our campers at Minecraft U got younger and younger, we had to adjust our curriculum from one focused on coding – a progression that took a Minecraft player through in-game mechanics similar to software development, through actual coding in-game, to coding Java in an IDE to modify the game – to one focused on teaching basic computer skills like using a mouse and keyboard. Most kids walked into our computer lab having only interacted with iPhones and iPads.
The line is actually, "What's a computer?" ...the captions were computer-generated 🤪
As this parody video observed: it would’ve been a perfectly acceptable commercial if that line didn’t ruin it at the end. There’s nothing wrong with the demonstrated uses of the iPad in that commercial. But developing software, let alone actually learning about how AI works or tinkering with ML, are not among those uses.
We’ve become a society that craves shortcuts. Part of GenAI’s popularity is its promise to deliver us more, better tech in a shorter timeframe. And while experienced, knowledgeable practitioners can use AI to accelerate their creative processes, even in education, it can’t allow someone to skip learning the fundamentals of their chosen field of study.
I’ve received feedback on Minecraft U similar to that in the quote above, although that one is so weird it makes me think the reviewer was being sarcastic.
Reminds me of this George Carlin bit
I’m talking about today’s professional parents, these obsessive diaper sniffers who are over-scheduling and over-managing their children and robbing them of their childhoods. Even the simple act of play, even the simple act of playing, has been taken away from children and put on mommy’s schedule in the form of play dates–something that should be spontaneous and free is now being rigidly planned. When does a kid ever get to sit in the yard with a stick anymore? You know, just sit there with a f*king stick. Do today’s kids even know what a stick is?
But you know something a kid shouldn’t be wasting his time with a stick anyway, if he’s four years old he should be home studying for his kindergarten entrance exams. Do you know about that? They happen now, there are places that have kindergarten entrance exams. The poor little f*k.
Already he’s being pressured to succeed for the sake of the parents.
I will add, there are still a lot of very smart, ambitious kids out there learning computer science. There were dozens of high-school students taking an AI summer course at UTD the past eight weeks. The course covered actual machine learning concepts and applications, and when I saw the curriculum I wished I could take it! I was able to see the final project from a team of about six of the students. It was impressive to say the least.
The world is still in good hands, at least a few pair. I just hope we leave them enough of a world to hold onto.