I may be writing this from the comfort of my home right now, but about a month ago, I was on the other side of India, i.e., near the East coast. I traveled with other enthusiasts and friends on a study tour, to Odisha. If you go about asking people in general about their thoughts on Odisha, chances are that they don’t know enough to even have an opinion on the topic, and just know that it is another state of India, somewhere in the general Eastern direction (for those of us living in central-ish India), or they know bits...
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As a pianist, the first thing I do when I sit at a piano is adjust the height of the stool so that I am comfortable while playing. A simple step, but one of paramount importance: too low, and my hands would start to ache midway through the performance; too high, and my legs would bump into the front of the piano while pedalling. Piano stools are usually very tedious to adjust. Older stools have a release mechanism consisting of a lever system under the seat. To adjust the height of the seat, one must reach under the seat and...
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A little over four years ago, my school transitioned from paper-based prefect elections to computerized elections, eliminating the process of hand-counting that took a week of the time of several staff members. This was in itself definitely an improvement, and what’s more, the software they were using was produced in-house by a 10th-grader in the Computer Applications [sic] class. But 8th-grade me observed the rudimentary text-based interface, poor error handling, lack of data robustness or recovery (yes, election data could simply disappear in the middle of an election!), and the completely unsatisfactory process of manually going to each election booth...
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Here’s a blog post from Willamette University at Salem, Oregon! I’m currently at MathILy-Er (which, in a manner typical of the general MathILy-Er environment, stands for “serious mathematics infused with levity, earlier”), a five-week intensive summer mathematics program, of which the second week is just getting over. MathILy-Er has a very different philosophy from many other summer math ‘camps’—the distinction between ‘camp’ and ‘program’ is apparently a significant one, at least technically—and follows a very free and open approach in letting students discover mathematics as they explore and toy around. In fact, there are no lectures, no individual problem sets,...
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This is probably a topic that has been extensively discussed by people much more qualified to discuss it than I am, but I still felt like trying to argue for my own take on it, hence this post. What qualifies me to write this anyway? I started learning to code around the end of 6th grade and have been coding since then, learning computer science in a very fragmented way from multiple online sources in the process. In fact, most, if not all, of my programming knowledge comes from Internet tutorials and language documentation. In high school I have not...
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