MISTI-Brazil Tech Course Website: https://techcourse.vercel.app/
My name is Ashar Farooq and I am an MIT Class of 2023 student studying Course 6-14, also known as Computer Science, Economics, and Data Science. I have been working with Professor Jaime and his wonderful group of Brazilian students since January 2021 on an important technological literacy project. The group resides at UNICAMP Universidade Estadual de Campinas, a renowned research university in Brazil.
The project aims at creating, revising, and improving the educational materials on various computer science and electrical engineering topics, such as Arduino, Tinkercad, and other important concepts. A large factor in this project is its intended audience of teachers rather than the students themselves. The teachers are the ones doing the hard work of conveying the importance and essence of these concepts to the students in engaging ways. This audience for this technology course creates a well-oiled system of educating the next generation as the access to these materials provides an opportunity for the teachers themselves to fully internalize the material before passing on their knowledge to the students. This system is an effective approach from an educational perspective, similar to the saying “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” In this setting, we are providing the teachers with the resources they need in order to be a successful educator, which will last much longer than the benefits of simply giving the students the raw course materials.
The result of this project was the creation of over 50 pages of course content on computer science concepts, 5 presentations with examples, 5 byte-sized videos with an overview of the concept, and a website that integrates all of the content in a centralized location: https://techcourse.vercel.app/.
I was amazed by how fun and engaging the experience was! The Brazilian culture and their peoples’ outgoing friendly style shined throughout the program, which showcased that the work I was doing is certainly something I would consider pertinent to my professional, academic, and career goals. I definitely used many technical and soft skills that I learned from my interactions with fellow MIT students in this project. In addition, I also developed my own further interests in more electrical engineering and web development frameworks. Learning and re-learning fundamental concepts was really insightful as I worked to balance conciseness and quality in the materials, explanations, exercises, examples, diagrams, tables, and images.
The larger importance of technological access and engagement, especially as we come off an era of asynchronous/remote learning, was also made clear to me. It is fundamental to establish further access to basic educational resources on the web for those that might not have the content to learn from. However, this is not enough as true learning requires true engagement and purpose, both of which can be enhanced in a standard physical classroom or location. Technology can be an incredible asset only when we use it judiciously.