I have written a small prototype of a Facebook Photo browser because I wanted to extend my practical skills in web application development and just a better experience to view photos on Facebook. It removes the rest of the clutter and focuses on the photos only. I have published the code on Github and the demo runs here. I have also written a small post about it in a blog post.
Stuff I do
Facebook Photo Browser
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Collegememes
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In February 2012, Facebook groups emerged creating memes about their colleges. I just quickly threw together some code based on Rails, Mongoid and pushed it to Heroku. The app basically just fetches all the images and displays them in a more appropriate way than a Facebook group could. The code can be found on Github and the demo runs here.
Startup Idea - Tangible and creative education
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Growing up in a rather depressing neighborhood, I always knew I wanted to do something against the inequalities that we can find, even in modern western civilizations. Among the issues and problems, I view education to be the most crucial, but also a relatively easy one I could tackle. There is just so much wrong with the way we approach education, a system that remains largely indifferent fro the past hundred years. Projects like the Khan Academy are the right direction, however, I believe they are not consequent enough.
Technology is here to assist, to help humans reach goals and therefore should play the appropriate role in teaching, too. Valuing mentorship and personal interactions, I believe it is time to free up human time as much as possible by reducing lecture time as much as possible. However, technology shouldn't replace humans when they can't provide a superior experience for the student. Videos like from the Khan Academy encourage passive repetition rather then critical thinking.
I dream of and experiment with a more immersive experience for a student to learn new material. A student should be able to play around and experiment with a new subject, he should be trying to solve a problem before resorting to the new knowledge. That is where the word "creativity" comes from. I have been trying to visualize what I have been thinking of in an "Introduction to Maximization Problems" experience. See the link below:
The given experience is already built quite modular with Google Closure Library, allowing for easy collaboration. The next step would now be to build a month's or semester's worth of material to test it in the real world. However, given the limited time I have in college, I have to suspend this idea for now. If you are interested in this idea of teaching, please contact me on the left. I have strong ideological connections with tangible interfaces and libraries like this one: http://worrydream.com/Tangle/