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I know you’ve heard of gamification, but have you ever heard of festification? That’s what Microsoft did last month and is continuing until May 28, with the Microsoft AI Skills Fest. It’s a little odd, but it also looks like it might be a heck of a lot of fun. And you still three full weeks to participate.
Free AI training for everyone
Microsoft’s AI Skills Fest offers courses that are open for all skill levels. You can learn early stages of the lessons if you’re new to AI, or work on deeper topics if you’re more familiar with AI concepts. Although there are tiers of learning, it’s packaged as a single experience. You can work through any or all of the lessons as part of one unified course.
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Lessons are available in Albanian, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Global, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Macedonian, Mandarin Chinese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Simplified Chinese, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.
Sadly, conversational Klingon is not on offer.
But there’s a lot more, including hackathons, self-paced learning, challenges, community forums and meetups, and even (is this really a surprise?) an opportunity for Microsoft’s partners to pitch their AI-related training and related wares.
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For those getting started with AI, there are lessons like Using AI for everyday tasks. This lesson will help you “Understand generative AI and identify ways to use AI at home and at work. Write effective prompts and find helpful resources.”
As an example of the more advanced topics, you can take a course in Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft’s data analytics platform. The challenge helps you prepare for the DP-700 certification. During Skills Fest, the course is free, but if you do want to become certified, that’s something you’ll need to pay for outside the Skills Fest environment, and it’s roughly $165.
Register now
Register at the Microsoft AI Skills Fest registration page. It’s free training on a hot topic from a well-respected company, so it’s definitely worth checking out.
Prizes and discounts
If you don’t want to pay for certifications, you may be in luck. If you enter the Microsoft AI Skills Fest Challenge Sweepstakes (another name I couldn’t make up), you could win one of 50,000 free certification vouchers awarded during weekly drawings.
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GitHub is offering a 50% discount code for GitHub’s newest certification exam, GitHub Copilot. Once you finish the GitHub Learn module, you’ll be given a discount code, which will be valid until May 28, 2025. To make sure you don’t dilly or dally, you must complete the exam by June 30, 2025.
My experiences with Skills Fest
I dug into a few of the classes. When you register, you’ll get a long list of classes and trainings. I looked at three of them. I started with Minecraft Education – AI Adventurers because my friends say I have the maturity of a 12-year-old. It was a short series of videos. All of them were charming and very well suited to kids. If you have a child and you want to explain AI, this is a great place to start.
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Next up was Building applications with GitHub Copilot agent mode. This one is a 45-minute YouTube video that takes you through the full stack development process of creating a fitness tracker app using GitHub Copilot’s new agent mode.
The Microsoft presenter, Chris Noring, showed off Agent mode and demonstrated building the app using VS Code in GitHub Codespaces. I really liked how he walked through more than just the AI process and integrated it in with React, Django, and a MongoDB database. Very informative, all in about 45 minutes.
The third class I took was AI for Organizational Leaders, produced by LinkedIn Learning. You may not be able to get access to this unless you come in either via your LinkedIn account or the Skills Fest.
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It’s a quick 57-minute class on the details of AI technology, the business implications of generative AI, where AI fits into your business strategy, and a very important section on pitfalls, concerns, and limits of AI technology. Each of the five main chapters is punctuated by a short quiz, and there’s a 10-question final exam. The result is a nice certificate, suitable for framing. I paid no fee to get the certificate, which is also cool.
David Gewirtz/ZDNET
An interesting note is that many of the classes and trainings listed in Skills Fest aren’t gated, so you can do them even after the Skills Fest ended. The Minecraft series, for example, is reachable by anyone with the link, as is the GitHub YouTube video.
A Guinness World Record
Image: Microsoft
Microsoft began the Skills Fest event in April with a big goal: to win a world record. And they did it, too. The previous holder for the title of “most users to take an online multi-level artificial intelligence lesson in 24 hours” was GUVI Geek Network Private Limited in collaboration with the Government of Uttar Pradesh, India, who pulled in 46,045 online participants.
Microsoft and all the Skills Fest participants beat that with a total of 126,151 participants. Jeana Jorgensen, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Learning said, “The record is a tribute to every person who is investing their time and energy to learn a new AI skill or help others build their AI expertise.”
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Are you planning on registering for the AI Skills Fest? Are there some AI skills you want to improve? Let us know in the comments below.
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