Development: Principles

The main principles and ideas behind the AI-playground are:

• Introductory
  The notebooks are used as teaching material for student with little or no experience with programming and AI.
  They are very much a motivational showcase of AI, with some specific learning objectives in mind.
• Open Source
  The whole project is open source and only uses open source tools.
  We use a license allowing students or anyone else to use our tools for any purpose, including commercial use.
  We hope that anyone with interests in the project will consider submitting any developed extension of the project for future versions.
• Usefulness
  We attempt to make all tools useful for future student projects, start-ups etc.
  We therefore separate the parts of the code that are specific for teaching (visualisations, example models etc.) from the parts of the code that have more generic tools.
  These tools are build for also working outside the notebooks in normal Python environments.
• Real Time
  We want to show how AI can be used in real-life applications and thus have an emphasis on real time systems.
  The examples and tools should therefore stride toward being fast enough for interacting with real time needs, while including tools for gathering data from useful sensors and inputs.

Additional thought:

• Plotting
  We have decided to stay with Matplotlib even for purposes at the edge of Matploltib's capabilities (Matplotlib is for example not ideal for viewing videos). This is because we expect students to learn Matplotlib at an early stage allowing them to understand, use and develop the tools as quickly as possible.
  We also use Bokeh and other open-source systems for plotting and may switch more heavily to these in the future.