Education methodologies for better STEM engagement !!! GHC16

Students are usually viewed as lazy enough, not smart enough if they are not doing well or not participating in classes. In STEM , there is also the gender gap between boys and girls where girl tend to be more shy and not as proactive as boys. Understanding and teaching the interpersonal skills for both teachers and students was recognized as the first step for a better teaching environment. The second thing is understanding the differences between each unique student would lead to a better understanding and decreases stereotyping.

As some of the projects discussed were running in 3rd world countries, a common problem they faced was in funding. They recommended engaging with international organizations and techcompanies having a base in this country as they will be interested in bringing up better calibers from this area.

Another problem faced in 3rd world countries are the availability of resources to have to build practical experiments. This was the point were teachers and students start knowing the resources about it like water bottles and wood, and they started to learn how to recycle these resources into useful learning materials.

Another interesting point discussed was having a language barrier with the students, and how engaging the parents was actually pretty useful in the process by teaching them their children's curriculum.

Motherhood and academic career?? How can you make it work!!

I am a proud mother of an amazing 2.5 years old boy. I love him dearly, but you always try to manage your career (I am PhD candidate and freelance researcher) with the additional new responsibility of having a family. I attended the session today about surviving the bad side of academic motherhood mainly because I wanted to hear that women actually passed through that and were able to succeed! Its so motivating to see a community of women peacemakers able to make a change both in technology and in their children's lives.

 The cool thing is that there were some men in the audience :)!!making me happy that many realise its actually parenthood not just motherhood :)

Important advice through the session:
1-ask and negotiate ,never assume that asking for a leave for example would be refused.

2- parenting skills do help you in dealing with kids, and colleagues !

3-paradigm shift! Being a graduate student with kids is different than thinking as a stay at home mom who is a student.

4- know your rights
5- there are some support and funding if you stop your tenure track.

6- if you are a senior, press for childcare in various locations

7-stay away from demotivating communities and surround yourself with helpful people

8- use graphs to visualize that outside leaves you actually increase in your performance

Be supportive of other mothers :), and know that you are amazing string women :).

Demystifying Deep learning GHC16

This session gave the best introduction to deep learning for machine learning enthusiasts.It showed the difference between classic ML and deep learning and what is so "deep" about it. Never new it was based on neural networks! Below are some snaps of what I thought are the most important parts of the session.enjoy! And please comment if you need more details!

Ed tech panel GHC16

ED TECH
Had the opportunity to attend the panel shared by teachers by teachers, knewton,quuzlet,Microsoft and Google. It was always about facilitated education in the classroom through technology.

 When discussing what are the best approaches for education, it was mentioned that it should be fun and personalized. ED TECH as a field offers that in a way that facilitates reaching to larger scale of students in various areas,assisting the teacher in any way possible.

All the companies agreed on the necessity of performing the testing of their technology on actual students within their respective schools,although it might be difficult as in some cases it can cause a delay in launching products.


The main problem ed tech companies face while introducing new products is the reluctance in trying new technology that might overcome class time.

Technically speaking, they need to ensure privacy of data, and the ease of reaching the technology by users without complex infrastructure to increase the involvement of 3rd parties.

ED TECH requires a lot of experimentation and resources, that's why smaller companies tend to rely on Ads or collaborate with existing larger companies in the market.

ED TECH also facilitates Information sharing and collaboration which I think is the most important point in moving remote learning to.imitate actual classrooms.

Arab women in computing reception (sponsored by Toyota research) at GHC16

Had the amazing opportunity to meet all these passionate women about technology from all around the Arab world!! Toyota research scientists talked about their areas of research and job opportunities.  Also each member in the community got to talk about their work and what their passion is all about. There was also an introduction about ArabWIC as an organization.

GHC16 getting pumped up!!!

Keynote at Toyota center is just starting !! And it looks pretty neat! Very excited to be here and will updating!

GHC16 !!!!

This is my first year attending Grace hopper's conference and I am very excited to be sharing my experience there. Follow up with later posts for more details!