I hope this question is appropriate for this forum.
In this summer I am giving a 3-day workshop on machine learning and neural networks for advanced and very enthusiastic high school students which all know at least one programming language.
Typically a day consists of 2 hours lecture in the morning and later the students should solve a given problem (with help, of course).
For the first day we are going to sove a simple pixel counting problem in a picture (Or do you know any simpler interesting example)
For the second and third day I wanted to give them a more challenging problem: Consider the set of binary $3\times 3$ matrices. One can imagine every matrix as a chessboard like picture where every $1$ corresponds to a black field and every $0$ to a white field. The objective is to count the connected components.
I allready produced the matrices and computed a neural network. It seems to work (training set 50%), however I am not an expert in machine learning so my solution is most likely not good!
So my questions are:
Has anybody allready computed a neural network for the problem above and is willing to share his data?
Do you know similiar problems accessible for high school students which are better suited for this occasion?