Day 47: Birdie needs Sleep.

Tian (I) woke up today with amazing sleep. Yesterday was a bit rough for me because my mind became very foggy and confused by the end of the ride. It might have been due to dehydration, a lack of calories, or a sudden rise in temperature, but today I’m back, better than ever, for a learning festival day blog!

Barb (Greta’s relative) made us an amazing breakfast of fruits, croissants, and peanut butter with banana on toast for me. The bread was so good! It reminded me of how much I miss a really good piece of bread. Sarah and Joseph (the learning festival floaters for the day) shooed us out the door in a timely fashion. They were so responsible, and that made me so happy. Honestly, how much we have grown as a team makes me shed a tear. What the people say about growing together might be true.

We arrived in the Garfield County Public Library in Glenwood Springs in a timely fashion and discovered that we would all be teaching in the same room! Cons: students are distracted by other workshops, and noise can be overwhelming. Pros: Spokies get to see each other run workshops, which builds camaraderie and togetherness. This is our 7th learning festival to date, and everything just ran as smooth as butter. Signups happened, groups were created, and we even tried a new rotation today due to Greta’s suggestion and Charles’ support. The small group size made the rotation work well, and I taught one less session! During my break, I sabotaged joined other Spokies’ workshops. In Ramona’s workshop, I made a Caesar cipher wheel and finished the cipher sheet (I wasn’t sure I could do it). In Greta’s workshop, I made oobleck for the first time and punched it. I was also regaled by Ishaq’s Tour de France talk and became interested in the race. We watched some of the highlight recap together, and I became more educated about the world of professional cycling.

The library had amazing facilities and also treated us to takeout lunch. We do love good Asian food and decided to all order from Kedai Pho & Japanese Cuisine. I am always craving Asian food, and the udon did not disappoint. There was a food mishap where Ishaq and Joseph’s meal didn’t arrive. Thankfully, this situation was resolved quickly by the library staff. Meanwhile, Ruth shared some of her meal with Ishaq.

Ishaq and I have a machine learning festival workshop that we perfected over the past seven festivals. At first, other Spokies were skeptical about the fun-ness and hands-on nature of our class; however, we adapted our workshop to be engaging for all ages, from kindergarteners to highschoolers. We started each session with a presentation of how AI is present in our lives through ChatGPT, Snapchat filters, and self-driving cars. Then, we broke down machine learning into three simple steps: data, algorithm, and decisions. The majority of our class included four amazing activities/games courtesy of Ishaq and me.

Activity 1 trains students as pretend AI models. They are shown images that belong in category A and category B. They are then tested with new images that they designate as category A or B. We reveal what the categories are at the end of the exercise and score their accuracy. We review concepts like data cleanliness and AI’s pattern recognition. Activity 2 encourages students to draw happy and sad faces to train an online AI model. Students get to see in action how the lack of data often leads to misclassification and how difficult it is to produce good data. Activity 3 introduces the concept of unsupervised machine learning models. A pretend AI student classifies the drawings of their peers into categories with no guidance. Finally, Activity 4 introduces reinforcement learning where a pretend AI-robot student is guided by their peers through a maze, with a goal and a bomb. Other students give a number between -100 and 100 based on how the student robot is doing on the map. The student robot uses this number to decide its next move. A positive number rewards the student robot for doing well, and a negative number punishes the robot.

We worked out so many kinks in this workshop that I believe we have the best version yet. The activities are simple enough to scale down for a younger audience. I felt so happy and not as drained as I usually am after learning festivals. It is partially because the workshops went well; I taught 3 sessions instead of 4, and there were less students.

After the festival, Ishaq, Greta, Sarah, and I ditched the rest of the Spokies and headed back to Barb and Lindsey’s place, each with our own goals of napping, snacking, chilling, and blogging. I am in awe of Barb’s beautiful home and decorations. Soon, more of Greta’s relatives showed up, and Greta held a baby for the second time on this trip! I could never. We had the most delicious lentil coconut curry topped with mango chunks (courtesy of my amazing knife skills). This dinner was thanks to Barb’s hard work. During dinner, Joseph and Ishaq regaled me with Dragon Ball Z lore. Honestly, the lore was so ridiculous that I don’t know if they are lying to me or not. But, the creativity behind characters born in a no longer existing vegetable planet makes me believe that they didn’t make the story up.

I returned upstairs for my second serving of food and realized that birthday celebrations were in order for Ishaq. I returned downstairs to converse with Ishaq while everyone slowly trickled upstairs. Finally, I made the excuse of wanting to see what everyone else were up to and quite easily tricked Ishaq to follow me. Ishaq unsuspectingly walked into his birthday surprise. Happy 22, Ishaq!

Just as I thought the day was ending, we shuffled our way over to the freezing Colorado River. We played man in the middle, a game created by Charles, similar to dodge ball, except that the team escaping the bean bags was in the middle of a square play area. Ishaq took out Ramona with a hit to the face, which frightened Sarah enough to end the game. Luckily, she was fine. The Spokies entered the freezing river and swam along the current. Two pet ducks who were out for their evening swim also joined the Spokies.

Soon enough, the evening hit, and we were just about to leave when an ice cream truck pulled up out of the darkness. The duck owners were also trying to leave, but since the road was only one car wide, the ice cream truck and the duck owners had a faceoff. Unfortunately, the ice cream truck lost, but Greta and Charles acquired ice cream!

Well, everyone! Birdie just came into my room to sleep. I have been kicking this poor dog out of its bed for the last two days. That means it’s time for me to sleep too! Cheers to a blog published on time.