WebDev, Curriculum Adaptations,
and Cultural Immersions:
An Update from Our First Week

I’m together with Neil and Pamela on the web development team. On our first day, I taught the first lesson of the day. I was nervous, but despite some initial technical issues, things ended up turning out well. I got through all my slides at a reasonable pace and got students to install an IDE create their first web page.

After our first few lessons, we had to make a lot of changes to the curriculum and our courses. The biggest change was that due to the wide ranges of coding experience of our students, we decided to split the 100+ students into two groups: an advanced group and a beginner group. This allowed us to teach at different paces for those people who had more or less experience.

After lessons, we had an amazing lunch at the Landmark Hotel’s cafeteria. I ate fish, chicken, and other arabic foods like ful and muesli. Then, we debriefed and talked about slides for the next day with the rest of the group members.

In the evening, we went together to Jordan’s old city! It was a very great experience seeing the traditional and rustic marketplaces in the city center, and there were many cool stores. While we were there we visited the Roman Theater as well.

All in all, things are busy, but going well!: we’re excited for the days to come!

  1. user
    Kinan Martin

    I’m Kinan Martin, a current Master of Engineering student of Computer and Cognitive Sciences at MIT (Course 6-9 MEng). My motivation is to use natural language processing systems to build meaningful connections. I have experience researching, designing, and implementing a variety of text-based, speech-based, and vision-based multi-modal NLP models. I’ve applied these models to a wide range of use cases, including psycholinguistic, clinical, driving, and commercial applications. I’m currently working in the Computational Psycholinguistics Lab under Roger Levy on my thesis about probing text and speech based large language models for natural language understanding. I love learning languages. Currently I speak 10 languages at different levels of fluency, and I’m always learning more!