♻️ Junk or Treasure? Recycling Sorter
Teach the computer to look at rubbish and say which bin it belongs in. You are building a little helper for the planet.
← All AI Maker projects
🔎 What you'll discover about AI
The sorter only knows what you teach it. If you never show it a glass jar, it cannot sort one. What you leave out matters as much as what you put in.
🛠 AI helpers you could use
- Teachable Machine by Google — ask a grown-up to open this with you
- Or use your favourite "teach the computer" tool
Tip: you can always use your favourite AI helper instead — just keep a grown-up nearby.
🪜 How to build it
Day 1
- Choose two or three recycling groups, like paper, plastic, and metal.
- Collect a few clean items for each group from around the house.
- In Teachable Machine, make a class for each group and show the camera lots of examples.
- Train it, then hold up an item and check which group it picks.
Day 2
- Test it with something tricky, like a shiny crisp packet, and see where it goes wrong.
- Add more examples to fix the mistakes and train it again.
- Write down one item it always got right and one it kept getting wrong.
🧪 Researcher's question
Show it a kind of rubbish you never trained it on. What does it do? What does that tell you about why it needs lots of examples?