Programming Chat Bots to Teach Geography and Chemistry to Kids
One day when I was sitting with my son Shubhankit (7 years old) and a ten year old boy named Hemang, who likes our makerspace so much that he does not want to go back home, I got an idea to use chat bots to teach geography and chemistry to both of them. Hemang’s father who is my friend, told me that I should try to make him learn programming. Hemang is very good in electronics hardware. He is able to disassemble a geared motor and then re-assemble it on his own. Geared motors are used for building toy cars.
I faced a big problem in teaching him programming. It was a constant pattern that after just 15 minutes of programming he would switch either to building toy cars or playing Minecraft. I consider Minecraft a very intellectual game and I am happy when he plays it but his father thinks it’s just a game and wants me and my team to somehow motivate him to do programming.
I had experience of building chat bots during my college days when I was experimenting with Artificial Intelligence. I did not do engineering but lived and breathed AI in those days. So I basically thought of getting them to make chat bots with a few ‘If Then Else’ statements. If Then Else statements are the commands which help to control logic in a computer program.
A non technical example will be :
If you meet someone Then say hello.
Both kids liked the concept of chat bots. Also they were fans of Google and Apple’s Siri. So they started building a chat bot with my help. I did the difficult parts and they fed the data. They also gave design inputs.
I taught them concepts related to data like arrays, JSON etc. They seem to understand them. They then fed the data in form of JSON in the chat bot. I told them to teach the chat bot names of all states and state capitals of India. When they entered a state name in the chat bot it gave its capital. When a state did not exist in its data it told the kids that the state did not exist.
We built 3–4 versions of chat bots. I truly loved making chat bots with both of them. In one of the version’s, the kids could make the bot learn new states by just telling it about the state. After feeding in a few states this way the kids had an idea. They could fool the chat bot by teaching it non existing states! They exclaimed that the chat bot was a fool.
I told them about a principle in computer science — Garbage in, Garbage Out. After a few hours kids learnt states of India as well as design and programming in parallel. They had great fun. Interestingly the kid who loved Minecraft did not play much of Minecraft that day. He was busy in building the chat bot.
In the session with them I told them about elements of the periodic table and showed a small YouTube video about the periodic table. They liked the concept of elements. One of them was very happy to see Chlorine in the periodic table. He loved swimming and had heard about chlorine being present in swimming pool water.
Both the kids liked feeding element names in the chat bot. I had already told them (10 year and 7 year old kids!) about molecules, atoms, protons, neutrons and electrons. They could now relate those concepts with elements of the periodic table.
Both of them loved the exercise and learnt a few concepts related to geography, science and programming in the process.
I have founded an open education project called Fun2Do Labs. To know more about it visit : http://fun2dolabs.org . Subscribe to me on Medium to read my posts on education and technology.
