Simon told me today he was ready to start building his own DAE (Denoising Auto Encoder) neural network. He said he would be using a documentation page about a machine learning library called Keras at blog.keras.io/building-autoencoders-in-keras.html. He found this documentation page completely on his own, by searching the web and digging into Python fora. I just watch him google something like “How can I install Keras 1.0?” and find GitHub discussions on the subject that guide him along. Or I see him type “How to install Python on Windows?” and follow the instructions at How-to-Geek. Eventually, he came up with a list of steps that he needed to complete in order to be able to install Keras (installing Python 3 (looking up why it should be 3 and not 2), installing PIP, installing Tensor Flow, etc). It didn’t work on a mac laptop, so he tried everything on a pc and it worked! Two steps required that he used terminal. It was amazing to see him plan ahead, search and implement (notoriously difficult) steps completely independently.
He has started working on the DAE tonight. Working on a node package that makes `manifest.json` files (for Chrome extensions) at the same time, so not sure he’ll finish soon. “Mom, I’ve got so many things to do! There are so many thoughts in my head!”
