Hello from Sophie, currently on a plane to Frankfurt, where I have a layover before heading to Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Altitude:   10494 m
Heading:  72°
Location: 45′ 25″ N, 61′ 44″ W

Another January, another GTL. Last year, I taught Batxillerat (upper high school) students at a public-private school in Spain. That experience gave me an impression of what it would be like to be a high school teacher at a fairly standard school in surburbia. I learned how to plan classes that fit within a predefined curriculum. I designed various practice problems. However, I was limited by my short time with each student cohort and having to get through preset material so that they could pass their intensive exams.

This year, I have the opportunity to design classes and workshops on topics of my own choosing, which is quite exciting. I made some initial proposals to the schools, and we worked from there. My goals are to:
– introduce topics that are generally not in the normal curriculum
– incorporate activities based on problem-solving, so that the students have a chance to practice the concepts and see how they relate to the real world

Class 1: An Introduction to Linguistics

Audience: students grades 7–9.
Linguistics is great because the students already have a very good background – the fact that they speak a language! I want to share the wonder of language: the power of a productive grammar, the diversity found around the world, the existence of underlying patterns.

There are so many subfields, but I will focus on phonetics/phonology at the beginning. Phonetics is generally pretty accessible, and phonology comes with the ability to discover various phenomena by solving pattern-based problems (think NACLO). After these topics, we will touch on syntax and do some problems there as well. Any remaining time would be left for the students to decide what they are interested in hearing more about!

(There is also great potential for interesting linguistic input from the student body. Most students speak Russian and Kazakh in addition to English, and the school has many international students as well.)

Class 2: Activities in Cryptography

Audience: CS-concentrating students grades 9–10.
Information hiding has always been relevant, and it is definitely still so in modern society. I think there is a certain air of intrigue in the subject (secrets! vulnerabilities! attacks!), so that adds excitement to the mathematical concepts that underlie the techniques used. We will talk about different types of ciphers and explore modern methods of encryption. Activities will mainly involve code breaking. Based on student interest, we will also potentially explore the ideas behind hashing, authentication, and modern security protocols.

After-school workshop: Digital Logic in Electronics

Audience: self-selecting students grades 11–12.
I really liked the first unit of 6.004, when we learned how computers are pretty much just bit manipulators. In this workshop, the goal is for students to learn binary logic and be able to apply those concepts to construct some simple circuits that use logic gates. Depending on the students’ experience with breadboarding, we may also try some more complicated designs like a three-bit adder. At some point, we will discuss abstraction layers and how computers are built on top of this layer.

Puzzles?

Some of you may have noticed that I really like puzzles. My first puzzlehunt was at CPW, and it was my favorite activity that weekend (Firehose being a close second, of course). Experimenting with different techniques, finding patterns to solve a series of problems – to me, that’s what drew me to MIT. Time willing, I want to share this part of my MIT experience and run a fun puzzlehunt for the students.

I have a co-teacher, Alex Lynch, who will be teaching classes in machine learning and the Internet. We will jointly teach the after-school workshop. We will spend 1.5 weeks teaching at the Haileybury school in Almaty and then (hopefully!) take a 24-hour train to Astana, where we will teach for another 1.5 weeks at the Haileybury school there. I will be teaching mostly the same material in Astana, which gives me the chance to iterate and improve the classes.

Fun fact: Almaty is sometimes translated as full with apples.

🍎 Sophie

It’s Tuesday night at 12:30 AM and I just finished work.

This IAP, I (Evan) am working at Project Invent — a non-profit started by an MIT alum bringing design-thinking and real world impact to the hands of high school students. For the last two days I’ve been reading, and writing, and thinking about what Project Invent is and how to bring it to mentors and students everywhere. This means getting ~15 book recommendations, reading through an ESP-sized Google Drive, writing the same blurb 25 times until it sounds (possibly) better, and lots and lots of thinking to no end about what we can do better and how we can do it.

My particular project is “How can we better get the word out about Project Invent?” (where better is defined a yet-to-be-determined metric), and I’ve spent a good amount of the last two days thinking about this — thinking about how to break this problem down into smaller parts, thinking about who are the greatest influencers for educators, thinking about the best pitch we can make to potential mentors, thinking about how teachers look for new resources or opportunities for their students, and so much more! I think I have yet to finish a day before 10 PM (though to be fair, I start late, and take food and football breaks), but if you know me, I’ve loved it.

Over the next month, I hope to share with you all some of my reflections and thoughts on the problems we face at Project Invent, the workings of non-profits, and education in general.

To hopefully prevent my post from becoming too long, I’ll try to limit myself to two one topics today.

ESP is for real.

I think I actually started having this realization before I landed in California, but in some sense, non-profits are the grown up version of ESP. A lot of the work we do in ESP directly translates to useful work at Project Invent (at least so far). Being able to do things from writing professional emails, understanding complex systems, writing effective website text, to creatively reaching potential mentors are the workhorses of getting Project Invent up and running. I think everything I’ve done in ESP has trained me to jump right in and make a positive impact at Project Invent.

Conversely, this also means that ESP does real work. Though we may have lower standards and less time than the average non-profit, we’re doing the same work and, just like lots of them, making a real impact on the world.

I think when we’re reviewing classes at Scheduling Weekend, doing work at an HSSP, or even running around on a Splash, it’s easy to forget how awesome this really is. ESP isn’t just a club where we compete in a made-up competition or do fake simulations. The work we do can really change the lives of students and teachers — it’s work with an impact others wish they could make.

Evan