ISWU & IIT Agne How To Survive the ChatGPT Invasion - Strategies for Parents & Students
Link to full video March 16, 2024
Atharv Deshpande, 10th Grade, Shrewsbury High School, Shrewsbury, MA, and Registrar, ISW University, India Society of Worcester, Shrewsbury, MA 01545
ISW University and IIT - AGNE partnered together to organize an event to bring renowned Professor Po-Shen Loh to give a talk at ISW. Professor Loh teaches math at Carnegie Mellon University and gave this talk directed towards middle/high school students. The event started off with a brief introduction about ISW and our initiatives to inform those who had been to ISW for the first time. Ms. Durriya Doctor, the president of IIT - AGNE, then went on to explain how the event came to be in the first place. She then went on to briefly introduce Professor Loh to the audience. Prof. Loh is Singaporean as his parents were immigrants, but grew up in Madison Wisconsin. He has coached the U.S. math Olympiad team for the past 10 years and led them to 4 wins which had not happened since 1994. Professor Loh travels all around the world for different talks and events, in which he meets many notable people. He started getting into the talk about education broadly.
Prof. Loh went over a variety of topics to help parents and students succeed. Firstly, he went over how nowadays, kids have the “get a good exam score” and only learn what they need to and always think “will this be on the test.” They don’t have as much passion for learning different things, not even related to academics. He explains how being challenged and being curious will help the new generation’s problem-solving abilities and help them as a person. Companies look for employees who can deal with adversity and don’t always need “hints” or help. He connects these new thought processes to college as kids want to get into a good college for good credentials, then acquire a good job. What is not realized by many students and parents of students, is that universities “want a star, not a black hole.” This means they want a well-rounded person who also has a good personality. While you do need technical skills for college, it is not enough to get into prestigious colleges. Throughout the talk, Professor Loh shows different videos and images. He shows a form that teachers must fill out for a recommendation to schools, and it displays that they ask about many social skills and personal skills rather than academic achievements. Next, Professor Loh explains his initiative to try to make an impact on the younger community. First, he is in the process of making a free platform for middle schoolers to do math on. It is like Chess.com. He learned that in China, students were more competitive, while in the U.S. students would gladly share ideas with their peers. The website is sort of a game where you are with other students all around the world online, and you solve math problems. If someone does not get the answer or understands it, the student who does get it can help the other student understand through the chat. He is incentivizing kids to help each other, to create better students and wholesome people. If you help another student, you are rewarded “brain points.” He is making kids realize that helping others feels good, which in whole will help them make connections in the future and not be so competitive. His other initiative he shared was an online math tutoring class taught by high schoolers. It sets the format of a “twitch gaming stream” to keep the students on task and help them pay attention. This helps the high schoolers as they are helping others, while also gaining personality skills to make the class a bit more interesting.
Overall, this event was very successful, and the audience gained a lot from it. It ended with the audience being free to ask questions.
