#Introductory Video

#Module 1: What are VAEs?

This module aims to provide a basic introduction to VAEs. It starts with examples of creative arts by humans and AIs to trigger students’ curiosity. Then, through Shadows and Plato’s Cave, students begin to understand the essence behind VAEs. The module ends with a game to help students understand the roles of the encoder, decoder, and latent space.

#Slideshow

#Module Activity: Shadow Matching Game

#Module 2: Building a VAE

This module dives deeper into the structure of VAEs and provides hands-on experience in training AI. The actual structure of the VAEs is revealed and touches upon the concepts of neural networks and distributions. Students then look at how interpolation is performed on the latent space and finally re-train their own VAEs using their custom digits on the notebook we designed.

#Slideshow

#Module Activity: Digits Interpolation Notebook

Check out the activity here.

#Module 3: Exploring VAEs

This module consolidates students’ understanding of VAEs. Students first explore tools built with modern VAE models and identify encoder, decoder, latent space. Then, students take a quiz to recall what they have learned. The lesson concludes with the roadmap of their learning and guides a artful and philosophical discussion surrounding VAEs.

#Slideshow

#Module Activity 1: MusicVAE

1. Try out MELODY MIXER.
2. Try out BEAT BLENDER.

#Module Activity 2: SketchRNN

1. Try out INTERPOLATION.
2. Try out MIMIC DRAWING.

#References

1. Introducing Variational Autoencoders to High School Students.