Coding Workshop - Smart Assistant Device

Objective:
The workshop is designed to train students' creative and design thinking skills through learning how to program a smart virtual assistant.

Description:
Students will learn to design conversational models that can provide a speech interface for machines to understand human's natural languages. Given a problem they may face in real-life, they would experience first-hand how to design, develop and implement a speech-enabled virtual assistant to solve the problem. Each workshop session includes fundamental understanding of the inner working of AI-enabled speech assistant, and hands-on sessions on making the assistant work to solve a practical problem.

In the last session of the workshop, students will demonstrate the capabilities of the virtual assistants and deploy the assistants for others to use.

Hardware
  • Speech-enabled Smart Assistant Device
  • PC/ laptop with internet connection
Software
  • Common programming languages like Python/ JavaScript
Cloud Services
  • Natural Language Processing (NLP) Platform
Major Activities
  1. Practical workshops (4-6 sessions)

    Students will learn the basics of building a virtual assistants and the use of Natural Language Processing techniques to create various conversational models to automate daily tasks.

    1. NLP Basics
      1. Conversation Actions
      2. Intents
      3. Entities
      4. Scenes
      5. Prompts
    2. Conversation Design
      1. Dialog Design
      2. Logic and Responses
      3. Exception Handling
    3. Smart Assistant Device
      1. Testing on Device
      2. Deployment

  2. Showcase (final session)

    3. Students are tasked to create a virtual assistant to solve a problem they face in daily life. They would design the conversation model and program the logic, then showcase their inventions during the last session.

    Students may also do demonstrations at school open days, or help upgrade classrooms to smart classrooms.
Learning Objective(s)
  • Understand the inner workings of a smart assistant
  • Acquire knowledge of basic natural language processing techniques
  • Gain hands-on experience using a technology to solve daily problems
  • Learn to be creative in solving a problem with multiple approaches
  • Acquire skills of basic coding exercises to automate a workflow
  • Cultivate innovative and curious mindsets to understand the potential of machine learning for solving practical problems
Duration
  • 5-6 sessions of Maker workshop (2 hours each)
Difficulty
  • Low
Target Level S1 - S4
Target No. of Students About 20-30 students per class

 

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