The passion with which they presented was electrifying. Even though bias in LLMs is an ongoing research area, they still had the courage to tackle it. It was very inspiring to me as an onlooker, my new role since our 4-day project lab was over. These people had only learnt Natural Language Processing for a week and were already challenging the status quo of innovation! It was like they were screaming at the current AI research leaders, “Do better!”.

The other groups presented on interesting issues too. Amongst them was an Academic Guide Chatbot, a bot to help people understand sign language, and a data analytics project that did many observations and predictions on the Jordanian housing market. The students had picked real, big and tangible problems, and were actively trying to solve them with their newly found skills.

While still processing how great their ambitions were, I felt some seeds of happiness sprouting inside me. The seeds had been planted during the times I debugged their code during class sessions, particularly when they had a solid understanding of what made their code buggy. Their eyes would light up with fascination at the idea of not dealing with error messages anymore, and I would be happy just seeing the glint in their eyes.

But during that time, that day of final presentation, it was a different form of happiness. The “sapling” form, as I would call it. It was happiness at the fact that they had grown into fairly skilled individuals that could actually fill up some of the emptiness that pervades society. It felt like I was getting to see the sapling form of a potential mahogany tree in the forest of their society.

Enough of the Python Bootcamp Projects though! The Web Development team had them create personal websites, and they were really good! I was jealous that I couldn’t listen in and make a website too. I’ll probably have to hire the Web Development team for my own development.

A lot of the websites were professional sites where they basically had their resumés and contact info, but others launched theirs as home pages for their businesses. Some websites were for fashion and makeup, with the website background having GIFs of a beautiful Jordanian woman blinking with long, curly eyelashes. Others had their business ideas and portfolios on their website, almost in a bid to find partners. A few people took a more casual approach and wrote more informal information about their interests, favorite colors and favorite sports.

The websites weren’t presented on the projected screen. There was more of a “website fair” that had half the students observing the other half’s websites, and I think that format strongly favored students that had informal information on their sites since they’d have many icebreakers while conversing with the inspecting students.

A lot of friendships were made, and the final website fair of the day had an abrupt ending, collectively initiated by the students. The students swarmed the instructors to take heartwarming pictures. The male instructors got tossed into the air in celebration. It was their last day with us, and they thanked us multiple times over for engaging in the teaching program.

Honestly, I feel like the program was so enlightening and refreshing that all the teaching I did for it would probably only amount to 10% of the value I got from the experience. The conversations I had, food that I ate, items that I bought (I got a Zoro cosplay sword that I flew back with me to school) and the people I met added so much to what I thought was just a normal cultural exchange program. If I could be stuck in time, January 2024 would be one of my favorite options for where I’d want to be frozen.