Tag Archives: coding

Truly Student Powered

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For the second year in a row, our Inquiry Hub team has won the SFU Canadian Coding League Nationals. Three years ago, in their first attempt, they came in second. That’s a pretty amazing track record. What makes this record even more impressive: Our teacher who supports this student team doesn’t know how to code. He literally has no background in coding and everything the students do is above his capabilities.

Our students go up against schools with coding classes, and teachers who understand how to both code and teach coding. Our teachers teach students how to work as a SCRUM team, to take on leadership roles, and to distribute the work load among the team… And then our students do all the work.

Our teacher was actually surprised the team won again. He knew their project was good, but figured they probably wouldn’t give first place to the same team two years in a row. They won anyways. When I congratulated the teacher, he said he literally didn’t do anything, it was the team of students that deserve all the accolades.

I’m not going to say that winning isn’t important. The students put a lot of personal time into this challenge, and deserve the accolades. However, I will say that I’d still be very proud of them even if they didn’t win. I just love that our teachers create an environment where students can be so competitive leading themselves. This is a great example of a truly student powered project.

Here is their game.

The MC playing their game during the competition on YouTube.

And the feedback they received: 

Blogging Reader Revival

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I’m not ready to do it, but maybe someone out in the blogosphere can. Do you know what we need? A revival of Google Reader. Somebody with a paid version of a good AI coder needs to get on this. Build a version of Google reader but with some AI brilliance added in.

3 new features:

1. Have it learn from the reader. Whichever feeds the reader spends more time on gets priority in the feed.

2. AI summaries of the posts. The reader can choose from 3 levels, ranging from a one line summary to a detailed synopsis.

3. An audio reader option.

Make it free for up to 6 feeds, $6 a year for 20 feeds, or $12 a year for unlimited feeds. I’m sick and tired of apps gouging us for yearly fees.

So, who wants it and who’s going to build it?

“How good are my AI prompts?”

Two thoughts about yesterday’s post, ‘Playing with Chat GPT‘:

1. I used the plural phrase ‘Artificial intelligences’ and followed up with, “yes plural, AI is not a single thing”. What’s both exciting and scary is that Chat GPT and other incredible AI tools are revolutionizing markets like health care diagnostics, manufacturing and logistics, coding, customer service and tech support, copy editing and content generation, audio and video editing, and even education. I think anyone who uses these tools can see why it’s exciting, but why do I also say scary? Here are two reasons:

First of all, many of these tools are open source or open access and/or very affordable for anyone to build on top of. This is great, but also permits people to do some pretty nefarious things, like produce deep fakes, and use these tools in increasingly evil ways. And as AI gets better, so does the ability to do greater harm.

Secondly, we are going to see a major decrease in jobs. Now this is under debate, with some people thinking there will just be a shift in jobs, but I disagree. For example, you own an online website that hires content 10 content writers to produce daily content to get new articles in front of your readers. You lay off 7 of them, keeping your best ones, and you have them use Chat GPT to write articles similar to the best, most popular ones on your site, and the 3 best remaining editors tweak the AI writing, make it better, easily doing the work of 10 writers. 

This kind of shift isn’t happening with just Chat GPT, there are more and more AI tools that are quickly shifting the need to less staff, who are more creative and innovative, to do jobs many more people did. If you are an elegant coder or excellent problem-solving tech support worker, your job is safe. If you are just competent at coding or tech support, an AI can and will do the job better than you, and you won’t be needed much longer. The irony is that your years of providing support will have helped train the very AI replacing you.

This isn’t just about Chat GPT, it’s about a plethora of Artificial Intelligences changing the way we learn, access information, get fooled, and work. And the pace of change will rival the any prior advancement in human history.

2. After publishing yesterday’s post, I went back to Chat GPT to play some more (as seen in the ‘Update’ at the bottom of the post). Three prompts after my original one I had something that was easy to read, and would take just one read-over and final edit to be something I could publish, which would be insightful, and difficult to know was AI generated. I ended my update with: The question isn’t how good is the AI tool, the question is, “How good are my prompts?”

…and if your prompts are not that good… just ask Chat GPT to improve them!

Here are a couple Twitter threads with some insightful prompts for Chat GPT.