Learnings

I have always been of the opinion that 'If I can't explain something that I have learned to a beginner/child, then I haven't understood it well!'.

This has been deeply ingrained in me from my school days. I am very indebted to my school friends and staff who encouraged me to teach others. I remember teaching physics to my fellow hostelers. Further I was motivated to share my learning and experience with Embedded systems and robotics and later machine learning. I typically would spend time self-learning a new skill/subject through video lectures, courses, assignments, projects. After that I find ways I can discuss or teach whatever I have learned with others.

I have found that self-learning worked much better for me as I made my own intuitions, methods to understand and connect concepts. That said, I always benefit and take inspirations from other people's work.

Based on taking sessions in my college(SSN) for 'Tech Club' around 2 years and then conducting workshops outside, I feel that preparing content for presentations made me re-think how I look at different concepts. At times, I figured out different ways of looking at the same thing and more often than not the new perspective was more interesting and intuitive. I strongly believe that intuition is very important for understanding any concept. Be it robotics, linear algebra, physics or Artificial Intelligence or any other anything else.

Coming to the most recent experience, the workshop titled 'Introduction to AI and Image Processing'. It was an opportunity for me to revisit basics of Machine learning and also connect to people working in this field.

I spent time after my working hours to prepare the presentation. Meanwhile I got an opportunity to talk at a meetup. I had around 50-60 people attending that session and it was a mixed set of people. It ranged from people having mathematical background, some engineers, managers and some students. The sheer diversity of the audience made it very difficult to feed to everyone's curiosity.

I prepared the content so that even a beginner would be able to understand the concepts and relate to it.

Things we did well and I learned:

Keep the examples you want to present at the back of your mind. I am a person who likes spontaneity and feel like giving examples on the spot while getting a feel of the audience. But I learned that at times, people could view that as not being confident or lack of preparedness.
Also a dry run with an audience(meetup) helped for the preparation for the final India Innovation Summit workshop. Practise, recording the full presentation, timing, getting feedback from outsiders about presentation content, presentation flow were some things that helped me a lot!
Keep the presentation simple with a lot of Images, Gifs and less text.
I engaged my audience with plenty of examples they can relate with and then asked simple questions to boost their confidence. This helped me build a rapport with them and then it also ensured that they would return to learn more and not be scared with the difficult parts.

Mistakes and learnings from it:

Make sure that the whole team puts enough effort and prepare well. Review each others work with utmost scrutiny! Be hard on each other.
Check beforehand the level of experience of people we collaborate with. If they don't have enough experience and are also not putting efforts to prepare well, then it will end up being the weak part of the presentation and invariably people won't like it. You don't want this!
Find the motivation/goal of other collaborators. Is it money, publicity in the community or some other thing. It works better if other people are like minded and have the same goal.
PS:My friend Karan was a major inspiration for me who always taught others and in that process tried to improve himself. He would spend a lot of time teaching others. It was somehow a higher priority for him. I always felt he was never trying to compete. He just loved whatever he did and I was inspired by him.