Janez Demšar, April 10, 2026

Who Is Afraid of Gnomes?

Over three days we took part in three (very different) event in three different places.

The one we were most afraid of was in Srednja Bistrica, just across the Mura River, not far from Črenšovci and Murska Sobota. We were supposed to run two workshops, one for third graders and one for first(!) graders in primary school. We had never worked with third graders, let alone first graders! Yet that was precisely the point of the idea — to see whether it was possible.

Not only is it possible: it was great!

Both in the third and the first grade, we of course classified gnomes. The third-grade workshop went very well, but here we will focus mainly on the first graders, because they left an even stronger impression on us.

The first graders quickly noticed that miners have lamps, gardeners have shovels, and that builders can be distinguished from tailors because they have a belt buckle with a middle šnola. (People from Štajerska and Prekmurje had taught us long ago what the local word for a belt buckle is, so there were no linguistic problems. It turns out that each Slovenian region uses a completely different word.) Before long, there was a tree on the board, and the first graders — as we confirmed with certainty in the second part — understood how it worked.

In the second part, we worked together to define the rules they used to distinguish the gnomes’ houses. We wrote them on the board in the form of a tree. Then each student took one gnome and drew his house. (The happiest student that day was a girl who wanted to get Štefan, the dwarf with a black beard. A classmate had taken him at first, but then kindly gave him to her. She was so happy that she even drew a moustache on her house.)

We wanted to check whether the drawn houses were actually correct. We took one of the houses and “passed” it through the tree on the board. But the students immediately wanted us to “check mine too, check mine too,” and we came up with an idea: why should we do it? The students exchanged houses and went to the board themselves to check them.

The photograph is really needed here. First because of the chair: we were teaching artificial intelligence and machine learning to children who were still so small that we had to put a chair in front of the board so they could reach the top of the classification tree!

But let us not overlook something else: above the board, there are letters — both lowercase and uppercase printed letters. These are students who are only just learning to read, yet we can already — where is the Minister of Education when we need to show him this? — teach them how artificial intelligence works. So that when they reach and surpass the top of the board, they will know how to use it better, and those who become engineers will also know how to develop it.

And one more thing needs to be said: we are no longer afraid of the little ones.