Implementation
What Are the Gnomes Doing?
By establishing simple rules to determine a gnome’s profession based on its appearance, students gain a hands-on introduction to machine learning and classification models. In the first part of the activity, students identify the rule themselves; in the second part, they draw gnomes’ houses according to their own rule, and the computer’s task is to infer the rule the students had in mind.
Relevance to everyday life
Just like recommender systems, predictive models are everywhere. Meteorologists use them to forecast weather, banks to detect suspicious transactions, email inboxes to filter spam, mobile service providers to try and predict which customers will switch to competitors, drug developers study the effects of new compounds, and cars are getting better and better at recognizing obstacles on the road.
Connection with the curriculum
The activity introduces prediction models, a concept applicable across diverse subjects. It is relevant wherever data is organized into defined groups or categories based on specific attributes.