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End Of Course Assignment

For my course, Demonstrative Teaching of Science, I have teamed up with a fellow colleague to work on a self proposed assignment as an alternate to the Analytical Essay. We thought to make this assignment more relevant towards our Social Action Group Project which aims to transform the way we look at and interact with trees. Using our prior knowledge of usability and human-computer interaction, coupled with all the design considerations and relevant pedagogical approaches that we learning in this course, we intend to change our users experience and thought process using gamification of planting and gardening. For our assignment we plan to do something relevant to our Social Action Project. After consulting with our TA @usamajavedmirza, we decided to bring in bloom’s taxonomy into the picture. We are working to develop a Bloom’s Taxonomy like model for our project. Our goal is to investigate how elements from Bloom’s taxonomy can be incorporated into our project and how we can gauge the learning experience of our target users of the application. For example, an amateur would be learning different things than what a regular user of the application would be learning. Some key ideas behind this are listed: 1) Measure how readily our users are engaging and learning from our application 2) Incentivize the learning experience by showing users how their understanding stands on our version of the Bloom’s Taxonomy and awarding them points the higher they go up the ladder/taxonomy. 3) Target our users socio-emotional learning and help them improve their process of developing self-awareness, self-control and interpersonal skills 4) Contribute to the preservation of nature and trees in times of climate change and the sudden outbreak of smog in Lahore

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“How to write better code?” asked a computer scientist-to-be

This is a question that I get once every 2 weeks (on average) mostly from my colleagues and friends who are studying the same degree for the same time as I. Why do they ask me? To be honest- I don’t know. What I also don’t know is the answer to their question. But I’d try to summarize what I think of the question. The answer to this question depends on many factors. If the questioner is a computer science major, I’d see what year they are in. Here’s my year to year advice to them:

- Freshman year: Coding at first is really intimidating. Its given that you’d spend hours in front of your screen to find that one line that does not compile. Here, you should remain patient and learn to accept that this problem demands a finite amount of time and focused concentration to overcome. Using online sources like stack overflow and GitHub are great options but never a first step if you want to become a decent coder. Go line by line and figure out what’s happening and whether it’s the right behavior. Freshman year includes a lot of programming labs, projects and assignments. Try to do all of them and start well before your deadline (seriously). Make it a habit to write a small program everyday. Could be a simple program to add two numbers or anything of that sort. Do some string operation or something. This would not only improve your algorithmic thinking, but also would polish the syntax of the language you code in. Like everything else in the world, mastery comes after practice. So hang in tight!

-Sophomore year: By now you have some experience of the life cycle of a typical program: understand the problem statement, do it on paper the way a human would do, do it on paper the way a computer would do, translate the latter to the programming language in question, debug. Now you also know some basics of computer science through some programming courses and maybe a few systems courses as well. The scope of your programming assignments should not be higher than maybe some array based tasks or implementing a few data structures like linked lists and binary trees to name a few. I’m assuming that you are completing your programming assignments religiously. If not, you really should be doing that before putting in extra work to improve your coding. I’ve seen people depending/copying on other people’s work even in individual assignments. While some might get away from plagiarism penalties and policies of your university, others face some sort of penalty (could be a grade reduction or something of that sort). While the latter might learn a lesson, the former fails to develop their skills and ultimately suffers in their professional life. So leaching on a friend is never a good option, well not in the long term. Try to do it even if you’re finding it hard. Take help from your teaching assistants and the rest of the course staff. You need to realize that these people are paid to help you. So please utilize office hours and appointments to the fullest. Doing extra always helps like attempting optional parts or the ones that give extra credits. Do some interesting problems and coding puzzles like the ones on hackerrank and leetcode. These are some excellent resources to polish up your skills as a developer and problem solver because they include some obvious metrics like completion, correctness and time. Have a study group where you can discuss your assignments and homeworks. There’s a difference between discussing and copying/leaching off. Mind that difference.

-Junior year: This is when you’re comfortable with programming in general. You know how it can be applied in a array of different tasks. You might have taken some old school courses like algorithms, databases and operating systems. PS I’m counting data structures as a programming intensive course and did not give it a special mention in the sophomore section :(. Go for some interesting courses like a networks course, AI/ ML or maybe some usability course. These courses will help you appreciate how you just cannot run away from programming. You’ll learn new approaches like socket programming and programming over a network (maybe some Remote Procedure Calls?). Go for some interesting applications. I remember developing a simple chatting application over a network during my junior year. I hosted it on the university’s network and anyone on the network could use it (if they knew the ip, obviously). I not only developed it, but also made it resistant to buffer overflows and scripting attacks(XSS) thanks to my roommate cum penetration tester. Once done with your Databases course, you can go for a full stack level by learning some server side and client side scripting. Learn some server based frameworks in javascript or anything. Look for some widely used frameworks; the ones which have a wider developer community. The community support will help you a lot, trust me. Some front end frameworks (client side) like ReactJS and VueJS are great these days. You can learn them using some MOOCS if your university doesn’t offer a course on them. Personally, Coursera is a great resource. Its super easy to use and has great customer care. Their “Full-Stack Web Development with React Specialization” offered by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology is great. Once done you are fully capable to work as a full stack developer and the only thing stopping you is an internship offer from a company and time to practice. The latter can be achieved on your own, while the prior needs some homework and external networking. Connect to some local organization and CEOs on LinkedIn. Make sure you have a well maintained and updated LinkedIn profile and turn on recruiter discoveries to get recruiter in-mails. Be on the lookout for internship offerings and openings. Apply whenever you get a chance. Working on an organization’s project will help you learn a lot. It will not only improve your coding and problem solving stills, but also make you realize how important it is to work in teams. The latter is crucial to success in the industry since a project has multiple groups composed of many individuals. Be sure to take up work that is doable within the deadline. Keep a good relation with your supervisor and always ask for specific direction to get it right the first time.

Senior year: This has to be the most confusing year in-terms of future planning since graduation is approaching and life after is somewhat uncertain. Don’t let this fear of the uncertain get to you. My advice might not be very concrete because I, myself, am a senior while writing this. But I’ll try to incorporate my learning and findings here. The first question you might want to answer is whether coding is for you. This question is not presented before because there wasn’t an escape from it earlier because you had assignments that required you to code. Now that you can take up courses that need minimal programming effort like human-computer interaction and usability/planning courses you have a way out. These include courses like requirement engineering and planning. There are other examples as well which aren’t difficult to find. The answer to the question posed would not be a yes unless you completely love programming, in which case you’re on the right track. Loving programming is different from being good at it. You might love it and be bad at it and that’s completely fine in which case you should multiply your efforts to get better at it. Again, practice is the key. Try out programming courses on Coursera or some other platform. Get a github for student account. You’ll get it for free if you have an email account provided by your university. I’d like to make a special mention to Educative.io which offers a plethora of courses for free if you have a github for students. Educative.io is user friendly and keeps good track of your progress through the course. It is run by a very dedicated team. I personally know people working there who write articles and make courses. Almost all of them have worked as teaching assistants during their time at the university and most certainly know what they are doing and there work reflects their capabilites. They have some amazing courses. Do check it out if you have a github for students account. You’d also get free access to paid tools like AWS, Azure, DigitalOcean and Heroku. If the answer to the question is no, then you need to research more on courses and fields in computer science that do not require intense programming. These 3 years will definitely equip you with the skills that you need to do “some” coding that these fields demand. There wont be much but not zero at the same time. If you are still undecided about the question, you really should invest time knowing an answer. Ask your professors for help. Tell them honestly what you feel and why you can’t make a decision considering that you’ve spent considerable time doing it. They might guide you to a definitive answer. And then continue according to the answer. Now’s also a good time to look into industry’s standards and best practices. Maybe learn a new language? Or try using mainstream tools and familiarize yourself with devOps. Some of them are Docker, Jenkins, Slack, Jira, Git and many more, each with a set of its own unique features. Their knowledge and use will help you once you land a job because most organizations use them on a daily basis. Try some cloud computing platforms like the Amazon web services, Microsoft’s Azure and Google’s Cloud Platform. These platforms offer an array of services like storage, hosting and compute. Familiarize yourself with their usage because they usually have a learning curve. Do a lot of hobby coding. Try different approaches to a problem. For example I was going through geekforgeeks and came across an interesting problem which had a greedy solution and required an LCM (Least Common Multiple) of two numbers. The author had used a builtin function for computing it. I wondered if I could write it recursively. I decomposed the problem and found an optimal substructure which proved that a recursive solution should exist. I worked on it and wrote it and it worked. It was a mere 10 liner. Practice like the one mentioned will help you develop confidence while improving your coding skills. So practice writing code even if its not that intensive and long and hopefully you’ll see improvement.

This concludes my very first attempt that writing. I plan to write more and post here often. I’m eager to get feedback and comments. Here’s my LinkedIn profile. I really hope this helps the reader. Thank you for reading

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Bill highlights the inequality in education in the US. He is among the top contributor, monetarily, in the US. The Bill and Melinda gates foundation promotes scientific thoughts by taking up real problems in the world. They recently had a go at India’s toilet and sanitary problem. Science students and professors were encouraged to present their ideas and solution and the most viable and efficient ones could be used to solve the problems. The very idea of solving problems gives science education a new dimension and provokes thought especially in school going kids. Had science education always been like that, would we even have the problems we’re facing today? Who knows?

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The tech Mogul, Steve Jobs, who continues to be the idol for many people including me had his say on education. He compared education with other valuables one might own. He focuses on the fact that parents usually don’t research much when admitting their children to schools. 

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Led by professor and educator Dr. Sabieh Anwar, khwarizmi Science Society gives a whole new meaning to experimental and demonstrative education of science. The society actively promotes the education of science and proposes ways to reform and improve it in Pakistan. Their “Lahore Science Mela” was a major hit and attracted a lot of people, especially school going kids, into working and learning. Kudos to the dedicated team! 

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Durbeen is led by a super driven individual who believes in a teacher centric learning approach. Salma Ahmed got her Masters in Education Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her organization focuses on teacher training and pays special attention to the situation we have in the public school sector. This makes me hopeful of a better education for all

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What surprises me is the fact that there’s been a lot of studies done on this matter and we are yet to see promising results. Not sure if we need better policy makers or people who’d implement them

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A list of somewhat comprehensive reasons why education policies failed in Pakistan. Its crucial to dig into details and clearly see where we went wrong. That’s the only way not to crash and burn the next time

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Another great video by probably one of the pioneering of the MOOCs. From what started out as lectures for his niece, Sal Khan created a new city of learning through khan academy. He focuses on really learning instead of mastering a test.

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The secret to finnish education systems success is to let kids be kids. They do not believe in homework and only focus on hands on learning and experiences. This has shown remarkable results as Finnish students are ranked #1 in the world

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Ivory Tower

Just saw the documentary “The Ivory Tower”. It talks about one of the most prevalent problems the US is facing in its education sector. The increased cost of education, inflation and emergence of private schools have led to less people affording quality education. They point out some factors like tenured teachers to support their claim. Its a must watch for anyone remotely interested in schooling systems and education policy 

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An encouraging video that defines the problem clearly. This has been done before and proven to show results. Waiting for when it’ll be implemented on this side of the border

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“Forest Schools are long term programmes within a natural space, lead by a qualified practitioner. They focus on developing personal, social and emotional life skills through learner led, nature-based learning. Each session includes basic learning in counting, alphabet, story-telling, question-answer, ecology, building rudimentary tools, and organised games“

I remember discussing the importance of education on the culture of India with my urdu literature teacher during my O’levels. He told me about these forest schools which were led by “gurus”. Each guru had a group of students under them. Do give it a read. Gives us a new perspective on education

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Ted conferences have always been insightful and engaging. I recently started to follow their youtube channel, “Ted-Ed” and found some amazing videos. These videos aim to answer the big questions in science, like the ones in this link. The way they approach the problem is commendable. They start with the very basics and you would not feel any knowledge barrier. You’d be able to grasp most of it even if you’re not an expert in the field. Ted uses nice animations and soothing background music to deliver these advanced concepts. This poses a question that what if we start doing the same in our schools? Can the way Ted approaches these big questions, help our students to actually solve the ones we don’t have an answer to? All such techniques require the teacher to be really good at what they do coupled with these amazing teaching tools.  

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Just saw this amazing ted talk by Sugata Mitra. He talks how knowledge is obsolete in this age of internet. He focuses on letting the children learn freely and without any supervision. He believes that learning happens itself and a teacher is just needed for encouragement. He gives real life examples on how his experience working at a computer company compelled him to experiment with a computer and a bunch of kids from the neighborhood. What he found out amazed not only him, but also to traditional educators and even myself!   

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My friends and I learning and commenting about different theories of learning i.e Behaviorism, constructivism and social constructivism. This was an interesting session from our EDU 323 class where we looked at how important it is to focus on feedback when teaching.

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Kinds of intelligence(s)

Got to know that there are 8 different kinds of intelligences: 1) the one that’s measured  using IQ tests 2) logical or math 3) musical 4) spatial 5) bodily kinesthetic 6) interpersonal 7) intrapersonal 8) naturalist 9) teaching 10) existential