AI skills building for school students with ozzybots | Deakin Applied Artificial Intelligence Initiative

Challenge

Deakin applied AI researchers identified a gap in the market for freely accessible, child friendly materials for students to learn programming, artificial intelligence, and mathematics, which does do not interrupt the learning journey with advertisements. Barriers to AI education include subscription fees or a requirement to attend in-person.

Impact

The ozzybots program is in use by secondary students, teachers, parents, tutors, and TAFE students. It has been accessed in 10 countries, including Australia, India, Saudi Arabia, United States, Egypt and Sweden. The ozzybots program is free for all users, has no registration program and is available online. Users of ozzybots include: • Secondary school students • Teachers • Parents • Tutors • TAFE students

ozzybots is an innovative platform designed for students in Years 7 to 12, their educators, and families. Developed by Deakin University’s Applied Artificial Intelligence Initiative, ozzybots introduces high school students to the fundamentals of AI while building essential STEM skills aligned with year-level curricula.

Through interactive lessons, practical projects, and flexible resources, ozzybots simplifies complex concepts and fosters curiosity, mathematical thinking, and confidence in learning.

Dr Sherif Abdulkader Tawfik Abbas:
Ozzybots is a great tool to teach kids AI — and maybe even teach you!

Solution

The drive to develop ozzybots emerged from Dr Abbas’ interest in creating online teaching material on math and science for students. Ozzybots extended that framework math and python quizzes with AI content.

To learn AI requires some fundamentals in math, coding, data statistics, metrics algebra.

Example of making a Year 11 maths concept, matrices, relevant for AI:

Imagine a spreadsheet full of numbers – rows represent examples, columns represent the features we measure. Wrap that rectangle of numbers in square brackets and you have a matrix.

While matrices appear in Year 11 mathematics mainly as a topic about determinants and inverses, they become the beating heart of modern machine learning.

From simple linear regression on house prices to giant language models answering questions on your phone, almost every calculation is ultimately a clever arrangement of matrix additions and multiplications.

In this tutorial, we will explore why matrices are useful, where they hide inside popular ML algorithms, and how software turns matrix math into fast, practical predictions.

By the end you will realise how importance matrices are, beyond being just another mathematical topic.

Try ozzybots here