Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Research Seminars are free monthly events for school computing educators. The seminars are recorded so you can catch up or watch again, Raspberry Pi staff write a summary blog post after each seminar and some of the presenters will also write a short ‘Proceedings’ chapter about the content of their seminar.

Tomorrow’s (Tue 9 Sep) seminar from 5-6.30pm BST is Teaching about AI with an explainable social media simulator which looks at Somekone, a tool “designed to help learners understand the fundamental processes behind social media platforms“.

To register for the Zoom invitation click this link or the raspberry below.

Somekone – Teaching about AI with an explainable social media simulator

Henriikka Vartiainen and Matti Tedre (University of Eastern Finland)

To support AI literacy and media literacy education initiatives on the mechanisms of social media, the Generation AI project has developed an explainable AI (XAI)-based social media simulator, “Somekone”. Somekone was designed to help learners understand the fundamental processes behind social media platforms, focusing on four AI- and data-driven core concepts: data collection, user profiling, engagement metrics, and recommendation algorithms. The simulator also illustrates the concept of similarity, how filter bubbles form, and how polarisation happens on social media.

This talk describes the educational theory, pedagogical strategies, and classroom resources developed to support teachers and invites participants to experiment on the tool the same way it is used in classroom environments.

The theme for their 2025 seminar series is “teaching about AI and data science*” – find out more about the future seminars (titles only below) and the speakers for tomorrow’s session at their main Research Seminars page.

*”…looking at research in schools to identify what students should learn about AI, machine learning, and data science, and the best ways to teach these critical topics.”

Future seminars

14 October: Viktoriya Olari (Free University of Berlin)
Data-related concepts and practices for AI education in K–12

11 November: Karl-Emil Bilstrup (Copenhagen University)
Using the micro:bit to learn about machine learning practices

2 December: Jesús Moreno Leon (University of Seville)
How to measure AI literacy

Timings, online anywhere in the world

Seminars usually take place on the first Tuesday of each month at
17:00–18:30 BST
12:00–13:30 EDT
9:00–10:30 PDT
18:00–19:30 CEST

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