DiscoG Coding Academy

Can a computer understand how you feel? Year 5 to 9 students in Harrow spent a Saturday building an AI that reads emotion in language, the same technology behind the chatbots and review systems used by companies every day. They left knowing not just what sentiment analysis is, but how to build one from scratch in Python.

Human or AI? Workshop 3 of DiscoG X brought a masters researcher into DiscoG Coding Academy in Harrow to explore one of the most pressing questions in technology right now. Students played a real research game, then added logic to DiscoG's own version, built around 40 paintings sourced from Wikimedia Commons and a set of AI-generated images created from written descriptions alone.

Can a robot show that it is angry? Confused? Jolly? Workshop 2 of DiscoG X invited a human-robot interaction designer to co-host a session exploring exactly that. Students wore cardboard box costumes to act out emotions, then worked in pairs to tune a real robot's movement using potentiometer dials. The question they were answering is one that researchers in robotics are genuinely working on right now.

Year 5 to 9 students wrote Python code to connect to a live data feed and track the International Space Station in real time. Watching the ISS move across their screens every three seconds, on a program they had typed themselves, was a genuine moment. Since the workshop, students have been going back to re-run their tracker during weekly classes just to see where the ISS is now.