Field notes: promoting AI education in Taiwan

It’s great to see the government in Taiwan step up its efforts to promote the teaching of AI in its elementary and high schools through its latest educational policy initiatives. At the 2019 Start! event held last Saturday at the Jiangcui Junior High School in New Taipei City, I had the privilege of witnessing some of the early results of these efforts when sixty-seven teams from schools throughout the island came together to put their driverless vehicles through their paces and compete with each other in various autonomous driving tasks.

Talking with the Commissioner of the Education Department of New Taipei City and the school principal, I was deeply impressed by their enthusiasm for giving students the opportunity to gain hands-on experience in AI development from an early age. The sooner students become familiar with technologies like computer vision and deep learning, the more comfortable they will be in using them in the years ahead and the more likely they will be to come up with new AI applications of their own.

We were delighted to provide our VIA AI Learning Kit for some of the teams to hone their self-driving car programming skills on, and look forward to further expanding our cooperation with schools, universities, and government departments in Taiwan on this very important initiative. The enthusiasm and ingenuity shown by all the teachers and students who participated in the event was truly inspirational and laid the foundation for even greater success in the future.

The VIA AI Learning Kit is an educational package that introduces school students to the basics of computer programming and artificial intelligence. You can learn more about the kit here. A series of instructional videos is also available on our YouTube channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAKlw6O4bY4&list=PLjnWqMMI8U0Is59WvcbU57i9w419n5g3-&index=2