A tutorial at SIGCSE 2017, Seattle

Aspiring Minds was at SIGCSE 2017 in Seattle in the first week of March. We were presenting our technical paper on devising a pedagogy for teaching data science to kids (it's out on ACM's digital library).

We talked about our design choices which led to forming this framework to teach kids data science. We also shared how it is equally important to have student-friendly tools which can help express ideas related to data science. We have begun our own efforts in this direction.

Here are slides from the talk: [download slides]

The talk was well received. In particular,

• we realized that a good deal of educators across the US are interested in devising curricula to teach data science to kids. Post the talk, there were at least 6-7 who walked up to us and had interesting observations to share.
• tech companies like Google are interested in providing grants to help define curricula in this area
• building tools to help intuitively teach data science concepts is still an unexplored area. What's the Scratch equivalent for data science out there?

SIGCSE also hosts a kids camp annually. Conference attendees get the option to drop off their kids at a day-long camp which contains a variety of short, interesting programs. We felt this would be an appropriate gathering to run a small tutorial on data science! Due to time constraints, we were given a slot for an hour to interact with them. And we made the best of it :-)

What was slightly different about this tutorial though was kids here were in the age group of 8-10 years, while the mean age in our previous tutorials was around 12 years. Challenging as it was, we did come up with a short story-tutorial to engage and teach them.

We had a cohort of 8 students - 3 girls and 5 boys. The core idea was to provide an intuition for likelihood. We did this by providing an imaginary condition to the kids where a mysterious disease had begun spreading in their neighborhood. They were to figure out what the likely cause was by analyzing patient information. In doing so, we also introduced the concept of histograms and conveyed how visualizing information helped in identifying patterns.

The cohort was quite receptive to the entire exercise. They were constantly chipping in observations and came up with smart suggestions when asked. Towards the end of the hour, they did, however, seem to get restless and were gunning for their next exercise - which was to try out Scratch on tablets.

Here are slides from this mini-tutorial.

This tutorial validated what we have observed across our other tutorials - it is indeed possible to get a cohort of 8-10 year olds appreciate a data-driven approach to problem solving/fact-finding!

Thanks to Charles, Dale-Marie and Valerie and other organizers at SIGCSE for making this happen! Thanks to the student volunteers too who helped out with the tutorial and in providing critical feedback on the tutorial.

It was very interesting to note that several students thought of big data as a viable career option - Mentor experience by Lavanya Marla

Lavanya Marla Assistant Professor, Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The data science workshop was a very exciting platform to explore the interests and exposure of middle and high schoolers in 'big data'. It was very interesting to note that several students thought of big data as a viable career option, and were keen to learn more about what fields big data could be related to. There was considerable eagerness to learn the underlying mathematical concepts and a lot of discussion as the students thought about how problems could be solved. Students were slow to open up and discuss, but once they did, the workshop had a lively atmosphere. One or two of the students had significantly more knowledge to statistical methods, but the other students matched them in eagerness to learn. The students who came with little to no knowledge also expressed that they learned a lot from the workshop and especially in a manner that the concepts were intuitive. The grad student instructors Naren, Colin and Raghav did an exceptional job of teaching, managing and conveying excitement about the subject during the four hours of the workshop. Multiple future sessions will be needed for a more detailed study of foundational concepts, but the success of this workshop gives me a lot of encouragement to build future workshops.

I was amazed to see such curiosity and intuition among high-school students - Mentor Experience by Narender Gupta (Illinois Camp)

The event was good, I liked it for multiple reasons. We talked about ideas that people have not yet been exposed to before they go to college and even then a lot of them were interested. Also, the turnout of roughly 20 students, which was almost double than expected, is a good sign.
Some of the students demanded more features and some who were a step ahead wanted to try combination of features. We would have liked a concrete web source to give out to students after the workshop where they could have access to data and basic machine learning concepts and models. It could also have a compiled list of related website links which could help students get a better understanding of ML and data science. Basically giving the curious students an easy access to this information to follow up with. Overall, it was a really good learning experience for me and I wasn’t expecting students to know as much as they actually did. When I talked about the John Snow cholera problem, some of them actually came up with the idea of putting the data on the map in a geo location manner and visualize the problem, which was really great. In fact, one of them came up with a question on overfitting and underfitting, which totally amazed me. I was surprised that they were even aware of these terms and could think in that tangent.

I discussed how we were analysing the data of just 20 people and facebook needs to analyse data of billions of people. It was amazing to see that they could appreciate the scale of the problem and the need of machine learning to solve it. It was a really humbling experience and would like to be a part of such endeavours in the future.

Without realizing it, and they understood all of it! - Mentor Experience by Colin Graber (Illinois Camp)

Running the class was a blast! Much enthusiasm for the topic was present, indicated by the fact that we had more than double the turnout we expected. The students were engaged deeply in the topic; not only did we not have problems getting people to volunteer answers, but we also answered questions on more advanced topics ranging from overfitting to learning feature weights.

What I find most striking about the workshop is how intuitive the concepts involved are when you strip away the technical details and jargon. In a way, the students learned about many machine learning and data science concepts - feature engineering, weight learning, experimentation - without realizing it, and they understood all of it! An interesting extension to the session we ran would be one where, after completing the activities we did, we would go back through everything done and discuss some of the more technical details related to them (this, of course, would be most appropriate for students in the second half of high school).

It sparked an interest in them - Mentor Experience by Raghav Batta (Illinois Camp)

The event went really well. The students were very interested in the workshop. Every student who wants to go to a good grad school is talking about Machine Learning.
We had a registration of about 8 people, but the turnout was about 20, which was really awesome.
I think the depth we went into, at their level, was alright. However, I feel it could be more structured. Probably a series of 3-4 lectures could achieve that. It would get more people interested as opposed to people coming in for just one lecture and leaving. People their age, coming in for just one session, might not get involved to a serious degree and they won’t care much about it.
With a series of sessions, only the people who are really interested would stay and gain deeper insights. So we could gradually talk about more complex concepts and come up with demonstrations using R or Python to make it illustrative.
We were 3 mentors for 20 people, which was a decent ratio. Also, the university was supportive with laptops and other resources which made it easy for the students to get the exercises done hands-on. The students were very interested and asked a lot of questions. Some of them already had a background and some were just curious, which is a good thing. A student came to me after the workshop seeking suggestions on how he could work around with the data in his project using machine learning. Another one asked my opinion on the statistics side of it. I feel if the students are staying back after the workshop to ask questions, it means they liked it. It showed that it had sparked a bit on interest in them about the topic.

Would love a follow up session - Mentor experience by Samriddhi Pendhari (Pune camp)

I immensely enjoyed the whole process of introducing data science to kids, in their language and with the examples they could relate easily. This session introduced me with a different way, in which we can connect younger kids to new possibilities and way of thinking. There was a good mix of students from different background which actually helped mentors to think of day to day examples to explain the concept and where it can be applied.

As a person, I felt enriched with new insight that kids can understand complex concepts if explained in their language and in a simplified manner. The most cool part was to have a predictive tool by the end of the session, which acted as the WOW factor of the whole process. Inferring and predicting the probability of making friends for the third person based on just the data they had, was really something they never had thought of.

I wish, if we can have more such sessions to show them how we can use data to analyze the behavior patterns with different mathematical concepts. It will be great. We could show them how median, mean etc. are utilized in different scenarios. It could be the same session or a follow up session. But maybe its too much to ask for from working professionals :)

Also, at the last, you both (Shashank and Harsh) are great mentors who also helped mentors to conduct the activity part within very short time. Appreciate the whole concept and efforts. Looking forward to get associated with more of such activities, if they happen in Pune.

Thanks for the wonderful office space wherein we did this activity. It was open and lively which accommodated the kids and mentors alike.

Samriddhi Pendhari

I bow to these inquisitive minds - Mentor experience by Meha (Pune camp)

Data Sciences, this word inherently rings a bell in my head because of my love for Data and how we can play with data. When Shashank briefed me about what the final objective of the camp was (to empower kids to think analytically) I was ecstatic and couldn't wait to meet kids the next day. The activity started with  questioning them about their definition of Data, followed by talking about John Snow (I kept on thinking about GoT- "You know nothing John Snow")- the "smart" person without any science background who discovered Cholera around 161 years back. He went to each house collecting data and proposed a reason for the cause of Cholera.

Kids learnt that data Science is used in our day to day lives and started giving examples. The friends you may know option or You bought X, you may want to buy Y are some basic examples of how data is used to analyze further information. Amay suggested you can also use analysis to catch criminals.

There was a survey filled by each kid about his preferences about selecting a friend. Looking at the survey sheets our task was to identify features viz. Name, gender and hobbies and Tally our understanding about how the person selects a friend. The shocker came in the end when Shashank weaved a story to explain kids the concept of data privacy and asked them to provide consent whether they want to share their data? My biggest learning from this event was "Do not underestimate anyone's capability based on their age". Kids are far more capable than any of us, who are we to underestimate them and say, ohh they are just kids?

My pre-framed notion about the camp was- we will teach excel/ analytics, but post camp reality taught me - I know nothing about the vast reach of data and the ripples it can create in an inquisitive mind. 

Once again, thanks for the fun filled productive Sunday. 

Regards,

Meha

Let's not be meritocratic? - Mentor experience by Parth Arora (Bangalore camp)

1. I think the kids were smarter in Bangalore. I had two 8th graders in the Delhi camp and two 6th graders here. And even then, the speed at which they were picking up what I was telling them here in Bangalore was much more than Delhi!

2. I liked the fact that the process this time was much more chiselled. We had a clearer idea of what we are supposed to do and could make the most of time in hand.

Few thoughts, I would like to share. I dont want this test to be a meritocratic exercise. We shouldnt test students beforehand and segregate them to offer the selected ones more to digest. I strongly feel that here the idea is for kids to learn a new way of thinking together. And often it is in instances like this, when average kids, paired up with brilliant ones, learn to calibrate themselves to a higher, better way of doing things and this learning sticks with them. I may sound like a socialist but I strongly believe the objective of this camp should be collective good in the sense I described earlier.

Also, I think we should slowly move upwards to target higher age groups. We could have a more elaborate exercise for the higher secondary students first. A lot of it is also contingent on our bandwidth also but I think there is a stronger need in the upper age band.

Thanks,
Parth

Is Anush data? - Mentor experience by Paul Bajaj (Bangalore camp)

It was a great experience to be a part of the mentor group for 16 enthusiastic 6th-10th graders introducing them to the world of data science.

While we waited for a few remaining participants to join, we asked the students 'what is data'. 'Everything is data', quipped Anush. We probed him & the rest of the group further, 'Is Anush data?'. 'Yes', said Anush; 'No', said the others. The discussion continued to help us uncover an interesting definition of data, 'something about Anush is data, Anush is not data'.

The day was full of such uncovering about engaging children with data science. I had a group of four to mentor - one boy and three girls. They varied in their abilities to follow and do the exercises we gave them. Rating children on a scale of 1 to 5 on their likelihood of befriending them on basis of given information on name, gender & hobby came easy to them. As did entering the data on a spreadsheet. They understood the features & could assign classifiers too (old/new to names; indoor/outdoor to hobby). While all were able to look for basic patterns in data, 2 out of the 4 were able to understand how to build their simple predictor. 1 was able to test the accuracy of his predictor. 

Two out of the four were able to extend themselves further - see that classifications did have some subjectivity (is painting walls indoor or outdoor), look at new features that could matter more (type of hobby [arts or sports or nature] being more nuanced than its location [indoor or outdoor]), look at new classifiers (length of name than its old/new nature). 

Overall, while what they derived from the hands-on day might have been linked to their own ability, the day succeeded in giving them an opportunity to engage with data & get a pique into the world of a data scientist. I came back with several ideas on how much more we can do with this goldmine of an idea!

Thank you, team Aspiring Minds for the initiative!

Data doesn't lie - Mentor experience by Upaang Saxena (Bangalore camp)

When I first learned about the data science camp being organised by Aspiring Minds, I made an assumption that it would be for some college students. But, when I was told that students from classes 6th-10th would be attending it, my first reaction was “What? How can they understand data-science?”

But, to my surprise, the kids were smart enough to not only understand the concepts of data-science, but also know how to apply data-science in their day-to-day life.

The day started with an introductory session about Data-science. Involvement of kids in this session was a key. When a student answered that “Data is very useful in investment of a company based on stocks etc.”, I knew, that it will be an interesting session. After this, there was an ice-breaker exercise, where we grouped students in a pair of two. In this exercise, we gave students some random images of Indian scientists and there work, and asked them to match these images. They Googled it to confirm their answers and worked together.

Now, I was mentoring one group of 2 students. Both the students were very curious about what is going to happen next. We distributed them one envelope each with some papers inside. The papers contained some questions, where the student was asked to rate a picture with some random name, according to what he feels to make that person his friend. Now, we exchanged the sheets of students among themselves.

When asked about what they have done with that Questionnaire, one kid of my group of student clearly said, that “we are giving you data to make a model”. As he said, we started building a “Friend Predictor” and they were excited about it. We taught them some basic concepts of Ms-Excel. We showed them how to represent data visually with the help of bar charts and Line charts. My pair of kids were choosing the bar charts for themselves and was arguing about “why this chart is better that one”.

Suddenly, while we were helping the students to make their models, one student asked one question- “Bhaiya, how can I apply for internship in this company? I want to be part of it.” 

For me, this was the moment of the day. An 11 year old kid asking for an internship opportunity was definitely something unexpected for me.

After the model building exercise, we gathered together in conference room. We made the students’ realise what “Data” can do. Even if we don't say anything about our likes and preferences, with the help of data, we can easily predict the likes and dislikes of a person.

Then, in the later part, we asked the students to have some more of the sample sheets and check that up to what extent this “Friend predictor” is working. They were amazed to see the beauty of data and I was happy to see that they learned something.

It was a unique and wonderful experience mentoring the students. This camp made me strongly believe that education is lot more than conventional school teaching and if students in this age groups be given an opportunity to learn these concepts, they will definitely do some good for our society and help India grow by making some “data driven decisions”.

Thank you Aspiring Minds for letting me mentor the students and giving me this wonderful opportunity to interact with some minds of future. 

Pre-session jitters and apprehensions - Mentor story by Vishal

It was fun working with kids. Teaching them about data science was expected to be fairly difficult task. But it really awesome to see the level  of children and how quickly they could grasp concepts. But at the same time I felt a few weak kids being left behind and were hesitant to raise doubts. Here I guess having a mentor to whom they could ask their doubts had helped a lot.  

In this camp it was interesting to see how I could make kids interact with me. So I tried to ask them their interests and tell them how they could use data science in their field of interest which was sports in my kid's case.  

I felt that little more time should be spent on teaching excel  so that they could try out new things with the data, maybe try out other visualizations and see if they were more intuitive.  I could see that they had no experience with Excel. Initially I wasn’t even sure if I should teach them about filters. But they could grasp it quickly and use it.

In the data that we were analysing all bins had almost same amount of data but slightly more on the lower side given the rubric. When I asked what could be deduced about this kid from the graphs they said looks like the kid is confused and doesn’t want to make a lot of friends.

What I had to specifically take care was that I don’t use jargon and keep it as simple as possible because that would make them stop understanding stuff and simply lose interest. Before this session also I feared that if not done properly children might lose interest in this completely and have a bias against it throughout their lives. Through the end we could see that children were pretty happy and were not bored.

Another interesting thing that I noted while the kids were writing the blog at the end was they were discussing what they had done through the experiment and what was the inference from it. So making them write about what they understood or their experience was a good choice.

Doing something for the first time in the world and the apprehensions! - Mentor experience by Abhishek

The day I came to know about Data Science Camp organised by Aspiring Minds, I was interested to see how Data Science could be taught to these kids. When I came to know about things which are to be taught to students, I was apprehensive about the success of this event because of three major reasons:

1. I was not sure if parents would take this much of pain to drop their kids to a camp which was not related to any of the academic activity of their ward
2. I was not sure if a kid of standard 5th or 6th  would be interested in data science
3. If students were aware about excel, formulae and graphs which were supposed to be used?

Thanks to our mentor Varun Aggarwal for instilling confidence in all of us that we will certainly put up a great show. Moreover, he also mentioned the pros and cons of doing anything which were never tried before.  Saturday, 13th June 2015, it was 10:20, three kids arrived, A, B and C (keeping them anonymous). Two of them were from 8th standard and ‘C’ was in 5th grade.

Me: What do you people expect from this Data Science camp?

Realizing the strength of data! by Nishant

It was a nice experience to make kids familiar with the data science. We believe that experiments are best way to make kids realize the strengths of data. 

Experiment:

Alpha and Beta were given 48 pictures of different faces, with accompanying names, and a favored activity. They were instructed to rate each person on the scale of 1 to 5 points whether they would want to be friends with him. The data set was further divided into 36-12 train-test set.

Then data sets were exchanged among groups. We gave the data collected from Gamma to the Alpha and Beta.

First, they filled ratings of likes and features values in the excel sheet.

Experiences with my alpha and beta by Tushar

A 3 hour camp was organized for students in classes 6th to 8th with the objective of introducing them to the science of data analysis and to teach them how they to play with data to derive meaningful information and use then to make statistically driven decisions.

As a member of the Aspiring Minds data team, I was assigned the task of mentoring two participants and helping them through the exercise designed for this camp. The exercise required the students to use spreadsheets

-          to study the distribution of data,

-          derive inferences on various parameters of information captured,

-          differentiate the stronger patterns from the weaker ones.

Did Marconi really invent the radio? Breaking the ice by Parth

Abhishek and I conducted the ice breaking session for kids. It began with introducing kids to each other by asking them to distribute i-cards to each other. We made pairs by asking them to randomly pick a card which had either a name of a famous Indian scientist or his invention and then they had to pair up with their counter part. It was interactive,engaging and informative - kids learnt something new by looking up these scientists on the internet. Some scientists like Birbal Sahni were hard finds. Kids were asking me what Paleobotany is. Also, the founding father of the modern radio lead them to Marconi- which is the usual perception, instead of the actual answer, which is JC Bose. It was a new learning for them too.

Ice breaking session

The name guessing game we played was also interesting in the sense that it gave us an idea of how kids think and rethink about a problem as you give them more data and more positive feedback. I think our next exercise could involve a similar concept too- assessing accuracy when more data is provided iteratively.

My experience with both the kids assigned to me for the exercise was very good. I think

Naive naive Bayes? by Gursimran

Today we had our very first ‘kids data science camp’ at Aspiring Minds. It was an awesome experience right from the tiring late night preparations, pizza parties, to content generation and execution. Though it will seem simple at first glance but the content generation turned out to be fairly challenging problem. We iteratively designed the exercise with student volunteers from the same age group to finalize the exercise so that it would be neither too simple nor too advanced for our participants. Given that we accepted applications from a rather wide range of kids from 5th grade to 10th grade, one interesting contention was whether to expect them to know concepts like mean or not.

Keeping in mind the bigger level philosophy to keep things simple, our aim was to inculcate the basics of how kids can use data science in their day to day life without bogging them with too many details. On the other hand it was important to not over-simplify things and detract from their learning. It would be a disaster if kids came away thinking the whole exercise was obvious and a waste of their time!

In the end, we settled on

Inculcating data-driven and structured thinking in day to day life - Mentor Experience by Harsh

Students were initially introduced to the idea with the help of few examples and explaining the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak problem. They were then’ introduced to the term Data science, and were asked what they thought Data was and what Science was. We followed up with more personal examples to which they could relate to. Probably Cholera is not so relatable but predicting one’s monthly expenditure and then asking for allowance accordingly was a good example. My personal aim was for them to understand the data driven approach of decision making which they could inculcate in their daily lives and not really compulsorily make careers out of it. I’ve personally seen the change in my decision making after I started working with data at Aspiring Minds and otherwise. A data-driven approach nurtures an organized and structured way of thinking which I think is a very valuable skill. So we talked about few examples from their life. We emphasized on how they could start keeping records of their personal lives and be more organized.

Experiment.

You can read about the basic structure of the experiment here.

There was mentor for every 2 students, and I was mentoring Tanish (right) and Vaibhav (left) who were in 5th and 8th grade respectively.

Above: Vaibhav (left) and Tanish(right) donning the personalized data flavoured ID cards with poems and TILs. Click here to read the story behind making them.

The initial training set was made by making the students rate flashcards based on whether or not they would befriend a particular person. The features visible to them were the name of the person, an activity which the person liked and the face of the person.

Tanish, the fifth grader,  was not really looking at the names at all.

‘I don’t look at names before making friends’ said Tanish so innocently.’

Jon Snow and Chlorophyll, err Cholera - Mentor experience by Bhanu

My first interaction was with 3 kids who had reached early for the Data Science Camp. One of them had a vague idea that, “Data Science is somehow related to Big Data, which gets accumulated in many companies and the companies try to run some algorithm so that they can see some pattern from the data.”, which was very interesting to hear as it shows that even the kids from 8th standard have heard that there is something as ‘Big Data’, ‘Data Science’ which is helping big companies make decisions and look at patterns.

The kids included kids from 6th standard to 10th standard. In order to engage them, in the starting we started a video which showed how to do basic programming in Scratch (a kid’s programming software developed by MIT Media Lab). It was again interesting to see that kids from 6th standard were already familiar with Scratch and they liked it as they were seeing a visual actor which was acting according to their script’s commands. So after an ice-breaking session the kids were broken down into pairs and each pair was assigned a mentor to help them with the further exercises and data visualization.

I was assigned to a group which had alpha, studying in 6th standard and the most hyperactive

Making Personalized ID cards for the Kids using Data - Mentor Experience by Harsh

It was the first time something like this was being done and we were all pretty excited. A Data Camp for kids? Other than the fact it was the first Data Camp for Kids we know of, it was also the first camp we were organizing as a company for the kids. The team stayed back in the office till midnight in preparation and the atmosphere was set by pizzas and numbers as we sat down trying to figure out the course content, flashcards, logistics etc.

The thing I was excited about the most was personalized ID cards for the students. So we have made them fill a form (todo) before coming to the camp. Apart from basic registration details we had also captured answers to ‘Name any one of your favorite books’ and ‘Mention one learning from your classes which has impressed you and made you think’.

We wanted to add personalized quotes to each ID card based on the interests of the students.

We had a to make 18 such cards.

Some of the answers about the learning in class question were:

“My teacher told us that Mangalyan has gone on Mars and if scientist find life on mars what they will do?' I thought that they will make a spaceship from which we can reach mars in a single day and some of the people will start living on Mars.”

So for this curious little chap, we made this:

Why a data science camp? A bird's eye view of the day

Having just finished what was probably a first attempt at something of this sort in India (and across the world too, I guess), we ought to be patting ourselves on our backs for having done a decent job. We organized a “data camp” for kids from the 6^th to 9^th grades a couple of hours back. We had 15 students participating in the camp, who didn’t quite have an idea of what to expect out of it. Furthermore, I had parents coming up to me fully surprised as to why Aspiring Minds would even be interested in something like this. And the answer to that was quite simple – because we believe in it. We believe that understanding data driven decision making would be an indispensable skill which would be expected of everyone in the years to come.  This is much like what’s happening with computer programming; knowing how to code today is not the lingua franca of just software engineers – a field of science simply can’t do without it today. We believe that this distinction would be taken up by the data sciences in the years to come. And to do something about this belief, we thought organizing this data camp would be a good first step and we’re quite glad we did :)

It was sheer fun – from understanding what kids find easy to grasp and what they don’t to gauging how they learn information not presented to them in the usual classroom format; was quite fascinating to see all this unfold before me. A couple of things that particularly caught my eye were (pardon me for a smiley excess in the notes that follow; it was a lot of fun and I’m visibly and mentally pleased about the whole experience) –

• Students aren’t really exposed to understanding the gravity of real world problems and how we use science and engineering in interesting ways to solve them. When Samarth opened the session with an example of how John Snow solved the cholera problem in London in the 1900s by visualizing information, there were some very interesting responses which the kids gave to how they would have solved the problem. It seemed that they really hadn’t encountered problem solving of the “real kind” before. I hope they’d have enjoyed seeing how most of the problems we see every day are not all that hard after all and just require some common sense (which is not so common after all?) and some persistence to get it done.

•  I saw first hand how time consuming it can be to give a good primer to a subject which an audience is probably very new to. I guess we fell short of accommodating enough time to the introduction part and were being ambitious in hoping they’d be on board in an hour’s discussion. But this is something we’ll definitely work on in our subsequent attempts (yes, yes; we’ll have more. We’re not stopping this soon, a duh.)

• Every class has its know-it-alls and the oops-didn’t-get-that :). The very essence of teaching something new would be to ensure that by the end of a session, everyone is very comfortable with the material that’d been introduced. We had quite a variance in the age group and the academic maturity in the kids who visited our session. I’d have loved to spend a lot more hours on the couple I interacted with who found it hard to relate certain concepts they’ve learnt in their class to what they were doing in their hands-on exercise. That’s where the real challenge was for me. Likewise, I’d have loved to spend time with the know-it-alls and challenged the limits of their understanding. In our next session, I guess (twiddles fingers). As a note - a systemic way of ensuring we don’t have a stark issue of this sort going ahead would simply be to have kids from at least the 8^th grade or above to participate. That promises to be a fun-fest!

• Percentages as a concept is so undervalued! It was amazing how kids were rattling off percentages when given a numerator and a denominator but were finding it hard to relate to an application of it. The dataset we’d given out had an equal number of male/female photographs + a short description of their tastes and we’d asked the students to mark whether they’d befriend them by going through such information. We wanted to see whether there was any bias in the way people befriended people – whether some picked more males than females or the other way around. And the only way to understand this was to think about percentages. Of the people whom a kid had befriended, we wanted to see how many were males and how many females, giving a sense of how the distribution had shifted from a 50-50 split in the raw data to something new here. And some of these kids couldn’t really wrap their heads around this. After a lot of careful deliberation did it start making sense. Very cool to see the reality behind such concepts sink in!

• There’s always a class sweet heart :). There was this fun young chap who kept us entertained with his quick wit and his “golu face”. It always is a pleasure to be around such folks.

In all, it was a great way to spend the weekend. I definitely look forward to more of these. Great effort by some of the guys in our group – Harsh, Gursimran, Nishant in particular to seeing things through. A loud shout out to Varun for having been this ever so polite audience to my rants on pursuing such a camp and for suggesting that we actually go ahead with it for kids :)

Will want to see this grow and probably evolve into something far more intensive and meaningful for undergraduates and high school seniors. I’ll aim for the stars hoping to at least land on the moon. Until then.

Shashank Srikant