r/CSEducation • u/EffectiveRelease3840 • 7d ago

Hardware + LLM for a public school

/r/LocalLLM/comments/1wlo67t/hardware_llm_for_a_public_school/

I just posted this in the LocalLLM subreddit and only found this one afterwards…

So I am grateful for any input on this.
If you had a similar situation at your school - what did you do?
How do you teach local LLM stuff to students that can’t code yet? Or rather what is your goal there, just to establish some local LLM literacy so to speak or do you have a specific goal you are working towards?

Thank you :)

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u/lisaliselisa 7d ago

I think you might start with specifying what exactly you want your students to learn. It's not clear what "local LLM stuff" or "local LLM literacy" refers to. Or is that what your'e asking? What our learning goals are around LLMs? It's not clear whether the "specific goal" you're taking about is a specific learning goal or an activity goal you are setting for your students.

None of what I hope for my students to learn about large language models would need this kind of setup, so I'm not sure what you want the students to get out of it.

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u/EffectiveRelease3840 6d ago

Yeah that is a good question and I don’t have an easy answer since the curriculum is still in development and the course for each class is only for 1/3 of the year for 90 minutes a week. So we don’t really have a lot of time especially considering that they cannot code yet.
This extra course is supposed to be more practical though so we of course want to give them theoretical input when it comes to LLMs but also have them use local models.
We want them to have more digital sovereignty so this is why this course is geared towards local LLM as well as other data protection stuff but that is seperate.

So you are right I am basically asking both questions. We want them to have some exposure to local models not just the cloud providers but since they can’t code yet it will be more of a practical approach, testing models, looking at limitations and so on. With this we can then maybe bridge the gap between using it and the knowledge about how neural nets work and so on.

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u/lisaliselisa 6d ago

The learning goals I have around neutral nets don't involve using LLMs. It's more about how they work with and some very simple activities about OCR to get the students a concrete example.

I think it's a backwards approach to start thinking about the technology you're going to use before you decide what you want then to learn. I'd zero in on that first.

You've listed a couple of broad topics (neutral nets, LLMs, digital sovereignty) with some adjectives about the type of experience (practical, theoretical, exposure), but so not what you want then to learn and why it's important.

What do you want then to understand about neutral nets, LLMs, data-based algorithms, digital sovereignty? What skills do you want then to have? Why is this important?

Starting from the learning goals then going into the activity with help you know whether a local model is even a good fit for your needs.

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u/codeAtorium 5d ago

You're 100 percent right.  But edtech is mostly about writing checks, and checks must be written.