Seeking opinion on optimal stepping stones for a child to go from Python to Machine Learning.
Summertime, kids out of school, and I’m helping them learn (or should I say keeping them interested and busy so that they don’t express Viking genes, sack the house, and wield broadsword-equivalents against each other.)
I discovered CodeCademy and they love it. Son learning Python, daughter HTML. They are cranking through lessons rapidly, and I am very pleased at what they have learned in such a short period of time.
A very smart professor told me that he and his team use Python to code applications that utilize machine learning against medical research and data. I don’t see why my kids can’t have fun without razing the house, and at the same time learn Python and techniques that might be very useful in a future career (e.g. with medical data)
Naively, I am thinking
Python, then API’s, and then experiment with passing info to ML libraries
just to see what they come up with.
As a problem area (not medical data for now) I thought it might be fun to tackle a very simple Augmented Reality app of some sort. If not the end-to-end app, at least a key part of it. A best case would be to include one of my interests. I am intrigued by the idea of taking pictures of Egyptian hieroglyphs, extracting some kind of classification data from it, and then matching it against expert translations/interpretations for that glyph or sequence of glyphs. If an easier problem space makes more sense, then we’ll do that. But SOMETHING to keep the kids interested and peaceful. 
Years ago I was in the software industry (coder, RDBMS, business analytics, and more), but I am a novice at ML, and A/R.
I appreciate any advice on
stepping stones from Python to Machine Learning,
and/or A/R
Thanks,
John