This past month, we have been learning about plant growth, the scientific method, and how to classify plants into different types. The standards focus on knowing differences between ferns, mosses, angiosperms and gymnosperms. But let's be honest - our students these days are more accustomed to using apps to identify objects, rather than lugging around a Field Guide to Dichasial Classification.
So, we augmented this lesson with apps! Most students are using their school laptops, which can easily run the website https://identify.plantnet.org/. They simply take a picture, upload it to PlantNet, and get top recommendations for what type of plant they are looking at. After introducing students to the basics of scientific classification, they are able to look up plants by the Latin name and discover which class and division they belong to. One highlight was a student pointing at fungi and discovering that mushrooms aren't really plants at all!
There are other apps popular in China for identifying plants: for example, the popular app 形色, which a few of my students already had on their phones. One team in Taiwan developed their own open sources program for identifying endemic and invasive species, and even WeChat has its own object identifier similar to Google Lens.
After using these tools to identify plants, a few of my students were more curious about how the technology works. As a side project after lunch, I helped some of them get started with machine learning programs in Scratch. They wanted to figure out if THEY could also code with artificial intelligence, to teach the computer how to identify different divisions of plants. It took awhile to get started, but it was a great passion project! Here's a screen shot from one of their attempts. I can't say that it ever worked perfectly, but it was able to at least tell the difference between "flowering" (if it actually HAD a flower) and "nonflowering" (if it did not have a flower). Quite a simple program, and not very helpful for species identification all the time, but it was a really fun way to introduce the basics of machine learning.
It's the end of the year, and they will be going off to summer soon - I can't wait to see what new programs they have built by the time they come back in September!
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