Our son is once a week having soroban lessons. A few weeks back his abacus teacher told him that he should learn to recognize his own name written in kanji, Chinese characters. The teacher is every week putting name tags on the desks indicating where the kids should sit, and since they change places from time to time, recognizing your own name becomes necessary to know where to sit. I took it upon myself to tech my son to recognize his name and decided to use modern tools to do this. So one morning during the summer holidays, while my son was playing with LEGO, I started to work with my AI-tool of choice and instructed it to create an app where different Japanese names are written in kanji on the screen, and when clicking on a name the app tells you if it is my son’s name or not. It started out very simple with just a clickable selection of names, but as I was staring to go through the iterations of making the app user friendly and adding the functionality I had in mind, it quickly turned into quite a sophisticated name recognition app with different levels of difficulty for separately recognizing the four kanji that is our son’s. As a training device it turned out really good. After only having played with the app a handful of times, our son learned to recoginze his name and now we just use the app occasionally to reinforce the knowledge.
The soroban lessons also led me to create another app. Having learned to calculate plus and minus, our son is now doing multiplication on his abacus. But to get the any kind of speed in the calculations, you need to learn the multiplication table by heart. The teacher told me about a song most Japanese children grow up with, where the whole multiplication table is being sung – we have started to listen to that song from time to time. Also, when we are out cycling together we often do multiplication training on the bike. But I thought it should be possible to make a fun game to practice the multiplication table on my phone when out and about, waiting in a cue or sitting in a traffic jam. So I went on to create a multi level multiplication arcade-style game with high scores and power ups and fancy space-inspired graphics. It is still quite mesmerizing to me what is possible to do with the AI tools, things I could never have done just a year or two ago (and even if I somehow had managed to, it would have taken me months and not hours).
The third AI-creation I wanted to write about is a cartoon. After our endeavors in stop-motion movie creation that I wrote about a few weeks back, my son told me he wanted to make a cartoon movie about a cat and a dinosaur and a robot. I thought it sounded like a fun idea, so we decided to see what we could create together. My son drew his characters on a paper, I photographed them, removed the background and saved them one by one. Then my son told me the story he head in mind and I wrote it down on the computer. We open the AI app and uploaded the images, the storyline, added instructions for background and scenes and requests for music and other graphics, and out came an animated story that made my son smile as he saw how well his idea had been realized.
I am quite happy with how we have been playing with modern technology in a creative and educational way this summer, and look forward to what else we will be able to create in the future.
