Machine learning is all around us. We all use machine learning systems every day - such as spam filters, recommendation engines, language translation services, chatbots and digital assistants, search engines, and fraud detection systems. It will soon be normal for machine learning systems to drive our cars, and help doctors to diagnose and treat our illnesses. It's important that school kids are aware of how our world works. The best way to understand the capabilities and implications is to be able to build with this technology for themselves. Also, the kids we teach today will go on to take a wide variety of roles and there are many benefits by introducing all of them to machine learning now, not just the obvious ones like developers or techies. For example some of them will go on to become the inventors of the next generation of technology.They will invent the next type of machine learning systems that can solve the bigger problems that we can’t even approach today.

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We need them to keep technology moving forwards, and maybe introducing machine learning to them today, letting them play with it, experience it, understand it – maybe that is what will fire their imagination and kick off a lifetime of invention and creativity. Some of them will go on to become coders, developers, makers and builders. The creators of tomorrows apps will need to know how to apply machine learning, so maybe introducing it to them today and thinking about what it makes possible is what gets them started on building apps and systems that will make all our lives easier.