Whether we wanted it or not, artificial intelligence has become a part of our everyday lives. Whether YouTube is feeding you suggested content or you’re using Google Maps to get to your vacation spot, AI is in more places than you realise.

The future of AI is rather exciting with myriad possible applications of the technology and, in a bid to get youngsters excited about what AI can do, Mindjoy has launched a coding course designed for children.

The “Get Creative with Artificial Intelligence” course as Mindjoy has dubbed it, allows children to explore AI and machine learning while learning how neural networks work. Perhaps most importantly, Mindjoy puts an emphasis on co-creation. We’ve seen many instances of how not accounting for bias can lead to the creation of truly horrific AI so we commend Mindjoy for highlighting the need for collaboration in AI development.

The Mindjoy course makes use of OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model and it was chosen for good reason according to Mindjoy chief executive officer Gabi Immelman.

“GPT-3 is the most advanced AI language model that humans have ever built, and it’s now open to the whole world to play with! What’s great about a language model like GPT-3 is that programs are written in English (or whatever language you speak), which means even your 70-year-old mom or 8-year-old child can use it naturally,” says Immelman.

On Thursday morning, Mindjoy invited members of the media to play with the language model on its platform powered by Replit. As Immelman says programming is done in plain language and it didn’t take long before we were tasking the model with writing press releases about jam and German poems about cheese.

Despite AI and ML being very complex, Mindjoy made learning the basics really simple and fun.

The course was developed over several months with assistance from developer Dan Davey at Mindjoy.

“Kids have amazing imaginations but often lack the tools to bring their ideas to life. That’s where AI comes in: Co-creation with Artificial Intelligence. This is an exciting new phase of human creativity and in this project track, kids will experience and explore what it means to be creative with AI helpers that they can program themselves,” says Davey.

With the launch of this incredibly exciting course Mindjoy is also hosting a series of hackathons for schools. Schools can register here and Mindjoy will select 10 schools that will host a hackathon, receive swag bags and Mindjoy memberships. The hackathons will be guided by Mindjoy coaches and learners will walk away with experience using real developer tools.

Interested schools should register here.

We’re big fans of Mindjoy here at Hypertext and having attended two sessions we highly recommend getting your children to check it out and see if they are interested. If they aren’t tell them they can write code that will do their homework from them, we’re almost certain that will pique their interest.