Distance learning is now required for students across Minnesota for the rest of the school year. Gov. Tim Walz announced last week that schools will stay closed to slow the spread of COVID-19. This week marks one month since educators began distance learning. School leaders and state officials acknowledge that the burden is falling heavily on students who were already on the margins.

Pokémon Go is a very popular game with kids and now it could become a learning tool. The game, which incentivizes players to get up and about by letting them capture and battle virtual pocket monsters, might be used as a classroom learning tool, in accordance with common core learning standards, as per Emily Howell, an assistant professor at the Iowa State University School of Education. "It is important to give students authentic choices that really have meaning in their lives. We need to encourage them to develop questions, research the answers and then share that information in writing," Howell said in the press release. Howell is working with school teachers on the use of Pokémon Go as a digital tool to help students learn.

Welcome to Hyperparameter Optimization for Machine Learning. In this course, you will learn multiple techniques to select the best hyperparameters and improve the performance of your machine learning models. If you are regularly training machine learning models as a hobby or for your organization and want to improve the performance of your models, if you are keen to jump up in the leader board of a data science competition, or you simply want to learn more about how to tune hyperparameters of machine learning models, this course will show you how. We'll take you step-by-step through engaging video tutorials and teach you everything you need to know about hyperparameter tuning. Throughout this comprehensive course, we cover almost every available approach to optimize hyperparameters, discussing their rationale, their advantages and shortcomings, the considerations to have when using the technique and their implementation in Python.

One of my professional goals this year was to learn more about artificial intelligence (AI). Over the course of the past year, there have been a lot of stories coming out about how schools are adding the concept of artificial intelligence into their curriculum or trying to weave it into different courses offered. The purpose is to help students better understand its capabilities and how it might impact the future of learning and the future of work. When I did some research earlier this year, I was amazed at some of the different uses of artificial intelligence that we interact with each day, and may not realize. A quick Google search of the term "artificial intelligence" turns up 518 million results in .17

Nearly 2,000 Boston students are awaiting special education assessments -- with some missing out on services completely -- due to a backlog caused by the pandemic, and one local parent has been trying to get help for her son since February. "We've gone eight months now without any services and that concerns me because I was happy to get a diagnosis early, but what does it matter if we are not getting anything done about it?" said Amanda Chen, a Boston resident and mother of a 3-year-old special needs son. Chen is one of 1,792 Boston families waiting on a special education assessment since the start of the school year, according to a Boston Public Schools spokesman. The assessments, which are necessary to get special education services, came to a halt due to the pandemic on March 17 and restarted in late September. "I want him to be considered a student in need, he really needs in-person learning," said Chen, who requested an assessment on Feb. 12.