Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a revolution in the last few years, and the number of developers, graduate students, and even high schoolers exploring the field has exploded. This begs a fundamental question: When is it the right time to start learning AI? We hypothesized that teaching students AI from a young age, specifically in middle school, is a perfect time to start. After teaching an intro to AI/ML course this summer, we realized that middle schoolers are indeed able to understand AI/ML, though with a few caveats. Let's establish a few baselines of what most middle schoolers know.

And here we begin to see some of the subtlety of machine learning. The actual classifier we built works only because in the training examples for each character there were ones with different backgrounds--so it can figure out that background isn't the only distinguishing feature.