After a fantastic assembly on Alan Turing, we decided to do a cross-curricular project in Maths and Philosophy on artificial intelligence.
In Philosophy we used a shortened version of the Ceebies story, from the If Machine by Peter Worley, and an excerpt from Eva, by Peter Dickenson to begin exploring what it means to be human. The kids came up with various answers: humans can actually feel emotions, humans grow and change, humans can learn and teach themselves, humans can create (massive debate on this one! If a robot is programmed to create something, did it create it, or did the programmer?) and humans have souls (again, very contentious! Questions the kids asked: Do we really have souls? Can we prove it? Do we need to prove it?)
Pupils then went to Maths where they learned about the Turing Test, and considered what questions they could ask a mystery entity to discover whether it was human or robot. They then came up with their own models of intelligence.
After looking at those models, we had one final session where pupils explored the philosophical issues raised by their model. For example, one class built their model on the difference between intelligent thoughts and other thoughts, so we endeavoured to come up with a definition of a thought. Pupils worked in pairs to write a definition, and then others in the class questioned them about those definitions, thinking of examples or counter-examples, helping them refine them. We'll come back to this topic when we look at Philosophy of the Mind later in KS3.
In Philosophy we used a shortened version of the Ceebies story, from the If Machine by Peter Worley, and an excerpt from Eva, by Peter Dickenson to begin exploring what it means to be human. The kids came up with various answers: humans can actually feel emotions, humans grow and change, humans can learn and teach themselves, humans can create (massive debate on this one! If a robot is programmed to create something, did it create it, or did the programmer?) and humans have souls (again, very contentious! Questions the kids asked: Do we really have souls? Can we prove it? Do we need to prove it?)
Pupils then went to Maths where they learned about the Turing Test, and considered what questions they could ask a mystery entity to discover whether it was human or robot. They then came up with their own models of intelligence.
After looking at those models, we had one final session where pupils explored the philosophical issues raised by their model. For example, one class built their model on the difference between intelligent thoughts and other thoughts, so we endeavoured to come up with a definition of a thought. Pupils worked in pairs to write a definition, and then others in the class questioned them about those definitions, thinking of examples or counter-examples, helping them refine them. We'll come back to this topic when we look at Philosophy of the Mind later in KS3.