Co-Designing Machine Learning Apps in K–12 With Primary School Children

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are making their ways rapidly to K–12 education. Google Teachable Machine, powered by convolutional neural networks, provides an easy-to-use yet powerful tool for classification tasks. We conducted a series of co-design workshops with primary school children, where they explored and designed their own machine learning powered applications with Google Teachable Machine. Our results show that Google Teachable Machine is a feasible tool for K–12 education. The trained machine learning models are lightweight and computationally efficient, and the applications are usable even with low-end mobile devices. The students and teachers appreciated the multidisciplinary and inclusive workshop, which supports development of transversal competencies in accordance to the national primary school curriculum.