13/08/2020

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Year 8 AI Day - tackling climate change




Year 8 AI Day - tackling climate change
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Senior Computer Science


Last week we began an exciting artificial intelligence experiment with Year 8 which combines Computer Science, DT & Engineering, Science and Geography, and the Eco Committee – truly a STEAM+ project! Year 8 will spend the coming weeks tackling the real-world problem of climate change by investigating our energy use at school, using our own data as well as publicly available large data sets.

We were delighted to welcome our school governor, Lisa Waters, who gave the keynote talk to launch the project. Lisa, an economist and consultant working in the energy sector, explained how enormous datasets, with information ranging from weather and day length to significant national events are used to forecast electricity usage every minute of every day.

Inspired by the fact that the Executive Director of the National Grid is a woman, the Year 8s quickly immersed themselves in their first ‘build day’ challenge: to build environmental monitoring devices using Arduino circuit boards. Staff across all four departments were all hugely impressed with their determination to trouble shoot, fixing their code, and rewiring their circuit boards with minimal input. These devices are now gathering data on temperature, light levels and the movement of people continuously at strategic points around the school site.

In our next ‘hackathon’ day, we will be joined by Nicole Wheeler, a data scientist from University of Birmingham, who will guide the students alongside the Computer Science department to feed our amassed data into machine learning models trained with large datasets about energy use from London and our own school. We are hoping for predictions and insights to help us change our behaviour in school to reduce our energy use – so watch this space!

Feedback from students:

I have learned that product design and creating products is so relevant to computer science and coding.

It was so fun to build circuits and link what we have learnt in computer science lessons. It was great being in a croup so we could share our own ideas!

I have learned to code using C+ and finding out what to do if I made a mistake. I also learnt to keep on going no matter what.

We think that the challenges are a good difficulty and they stretch our minds.

We have learnt how to work effectively as a team and assign tasks. We have also learnt that some errors in code are very small and hard to find!

I have learned a lot about coding as at the start of the day I was struggling to do the first task. However now I understand how to do it […] This was an amazing learning opportunity and I had lots of fun.

I learnt about the extremely interesting energy industry, and the use of electricity and energy within these economic sectors and the impacts created.
 

Mrs Rachel Evans, Director of Digital Learning & Innovation

Watch highlights of the day on Twitter 

Flickr album: Year 8 AI Day | Height: auto | Theme: Default | Skin: Default Skin

 







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Year 8 AI Day - tackling climate change