Machine Learning is the future of coding and in the last couple of years, more of our advanced students are focusing on it. Ask a Computer Science major what they want to go into. I bet it is ML.
This exposure and experience is important before reaching college. However, today’s high schoolers are incredibly busy. So many students push learning off until the summer: our Summer Deep Dive focused on Machine Learning grew 250% in 2021. Now we are excited to offer an alternative format.
We have condensed our ML Deep Dive into a 1 Day Workshop. Your son or daughter will still get the hands-on coding experience Breakout Mentors is known for. Now it will be convenient to fit into your busy lives!
What is Machine Learning?
Using data to make predictions. The incredible part though is that the computer “learns” the relationship from the data on its own. When you can’t find the pattern in the data yourself, Machine Learning can often do it for you.
It is used everywhere and growing fast. Autonomous driving, diagnostics from medical images, spam detection, finance, weather prediction, robotics, and many more. Yes, data can be almost anything stored on a computer: images, video, audio, text, numbers.
Exciting Projects From Current Students
Our ML Deep Dive students can go on to build impressive real-world ML applications with the help of one-on-one mentoring. In this summer’s ML Deep Dive cohort, students created the following ML apps:
- Automatic Bank Check Processor — converts handwritten text into digital form using images of the text for automated bank check processing.
- Automatic Pneumonia Detection — detects pneumonia using chest x-rays to help doctors provide better diagnoses and help patients receive proper care.
- CoPoet — writes poetry in the style of your favorite poet using automatic text generation from the prompts you provide.
Workshop Format
Each Machine Learning workshop is limited to 4 students. This allows each student to have their own code they are working on, with the mentor able to provide individual instruction as needed. We have also found this size helps participants feel comfortable speaking in a group discussion.
The Workshop will be led by one of our talented Machine Learning specialist mentors. He is studying Computer Science with a focus on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at Stanford University, plus he is excellent at making online learning engaging.
It will be 5 hours of content spread across a morning and afternoon Zoom with a long lunch break between. The sessions will be 9:30am-noon and 1:30-4:00pm Pacific Time. You can sign up for either:
- Sunday, November 14th
- Monday, November 22nd (Thanksgiving break) SOLD OUT
- Wednesday, November 24th (Thanksgiving break)
What Will They Learn? What is the Project?
This workshop will cover the foundational ML concepts including linear, logistic, and softmax regression. Students will learn via interactive coding lessons using state-of-the-art data science tools such as Pandas, Numpy, Scikit-learn, and PyTorch.
There are several small hands-on exercises throughout the workshop. The big project at the end uses real-world Airbnb data. Here is the scenario: you are a engineer working to make the process as easy as possible for new hosts to add their apartment for rent on Airbnb. Most new hosts struggle to determine what price they should enter for the nightly fee. Your goal is to create a suggested price tool using Machine Learning — so all the new host will have to do is enter a few details about their apartment and out comes the number!
“Is this right for me? What are the prerequisites?”
We design our ML materials for students who have solid coding experience. You should have 6+ months of an object-oriented language. The workshop will use Python, but if you have Java experience that is fine too. Students should be comfortable with arrays / lists.
There is no requirement to know anything about Machine Learning, nor have experience working with data.
No age requirement either, however we design it for high schoolers. So if your son or daughter is a middle schooler, we would expect them to be fairly advanced.
Pricing and Next Steps
The 1 Day Machine Learning Workshop with 5 hours of instruction is $295. With a maximum of 4 students, this is a great value.
There is a morning and afternoon Zoom with a long lunch break between. The sessions will be 9:30am-noon and 1:30-4:00pm Pacific Time. You can sign up for either:
- Sunday, November 14th
- Monday, November 22nd (Thanksgiving break) SOLD OUT
- Wednesday, November 24th (Thanksgiving break)
Since there are a maximum of 4 students, we expect these to fill up quickly. Please sign up soon if you are interested. We will update this page and the sign up form when a given workshop is full.
Go here to sign up and submit payment.
Please contact us with any additional questions.