classroom exercise: introduction to machine learning
I’m teaching Machine Learning at Pratt Institute’s School of Information this semester (syllabus here). For the first day of class, I wanted to have a sort of physical or paper-based exercise that demonstrates the concept of machine learning to people totally new to the subject. I experienced this non-computer-based approach to introducing computation through Zach Lieberman’s coding class at the School for Poetic Computation, where we started off by playing the Human Fax Machine Experiment which revolves around the concepts of encoding and decoding. How does one apply this approach to machine learning? There are some very intuitive digital introductory material that illustrate neural networks or decision trees, but I wanted something more tangible.