Brian Cox school resources: What is the effect of data size on a sorting activity?

Series 2 of the Brian Cox School Experiments are designed for students aged 11 to 14. They cover important topics and introduce teachers to a practical experiment, the commercial application of the technology featured, and the latest research being undertaken by scientists in that area. Each resource comprises three videos and a downloadable experiment that links directly to curriculum topics and is simple to carry out. Whether used in science classes, form rooms or careers sessions, these are an excellent resource to excite and engage young people with cutting-edge, real-world science.

In this experiment Professor Brian Cox joins a teacher to demonstrate this paper-based experiment, as pupils develop their own rules/algorithms for sorting sweets and aliens and look at the effect that increasing the size of the data set has on the activity.

The video resources enable students to virtually visit the Science Museum to hear about online content moderation using AI with Unitary, a company specialising in the use of machine learning systems to reduce the amount of online moderation done by humans.

They can also virtually visit Cardiff University to meet Professor Pete Burnap, to learn more about cybersecurity and the research being undertaken into technologies used to make our public spaces safer.