Ana Farič, September 16, 2026

Gairdin as a Club for the First Time

Can we predict tomorrow’s weather from the number of brown shoes in the hall? What kind of data can people from Prlekija use to prove that they really are different than people from Prekmurje? How (hint: by counting letters!) can we tell Finnish from Dutch even though we don’t speak either language? How do websites recommend videos to us? Why is the way ChatGPT works actually similar to playing Rock-Paper-Scissors?

This is how we described the experiment that will take place during the first semester at the Alojzij Šuštar Primary School. We named it: Gairdin: How to Make Sense of Data and How Artificial Intelligence Works.

Until now, Gairdin has mainly been used to “spice up” other school subjects. This school year, however, we will meet with a group of fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-graders every Wednesday to explore how to give it a shape that, we hope, will one day become a subject of its own. Together, we will figure out what is too difficult and what is too easy, whether anything is boring, what is interesting … We will think about topics and their order. We will try out activities we already know well, as well as new ideas that we won’t reveal just yet (spoiler on the right :) ).

Because we wanted students to get excited about everything that lies ahead, we started with something we know always works. Of course, you guessed it — gnomes.

When sorting gnomes into professions, we first cleared up whether miners carry a lamp or a bucket, and whether gardeners hold a leaf or a shovel. While drawing the classification tree, one student helpfully taught us that the most sensible place to start is with the shovel, because it “splits the gnomes in half.” We came up with rules for the houses and entered the data into a computer, which built the correct tree (and pleasantly surprised a student who wasn’t entirely convinced it would succeed). We saw that two gnomes had been classified incorrectly, at which point two students raised their hands and admitted that they had taken the curtains from one tailor’s house and drawn them on the builder’s house instead. We’re sure they won’t make that mistake again, since it’s pretty obvious that a tailor’s house simply can’t be without curtains!