I’m working ahead of my students in the AI and Machine Learning course and am on Lesson 7. I cannot figure out what the kids are supposed to be doing in this lesson! This is the one where you are presented with a grid that populates with characteristics of fruits and vegetables and you are supposed to draw a line on the grid to separate them. I honestly don’t understand the purpose of this lesson, or even how to accomplish the goal since in almost all of the configurations the fruits and veggies are mixed and it’s impossible to separate them accurately with a straight line. Can anyone shed some light on this for me? I’ve read the student instructions and the lesson plan multiple times, and have played with the activity more times than I can count and I’m still not seeing it. I hope to figure it out before my students get there in a couple of weeks.
Thanks!
The objective of Lesson 7 is to teach students how train a model to accurately predict the category of a new item that is added to the data set.
You won’t necessarily always get to 100% prediction accuracy with the data provided. The goal is to get the most accurate possible.
With the provided data, I recommend asking your students what two pieces of information would describe Fruits. I think most students would say sweetness and juiciness to describe fruits. Since we use fruits in desserts because they are sweet and people drink orange juice, apple juice, etc. If they plot the data with those two options majority of the fruits will cluster in the top-right corner, whereas, non-fruits will cluster in the bottom-left corner. So if you make a diagonal line, you will be able to get close to 100% accuracy with the data given (banana doesn’t have enough juice or sweet potato is too sweet).
Now that you have trained your model, you can go to the next screen where you can enter a new unknown item in and your model should be able to predict whether it is a fruit or vegetable. For example, you could enter blueberry and ask students on a scale of 1 to 10 how sweet and how juicy is it. Do the same for a vegetable.
Thank you so much! Your explanation is very clear to me, and I’d love to see it integrated into the teacher notes section of the lesson plan. I appreciate your taking the time to respond.