User:Mchua

About me

Electrical and Computer Engineering student at [Olin College of Engineering] (Boston area).

Homepage: http://www.melchua.com

What... is your quest: In a nutshell, work on technology that teaches people how to design better technology; I'd like to become an electrical engineering or computer science professor someday, with research focusing on educational technology and engineering education.

What... is your favorite color: Yellow.

Drugs of choice: Python, soy milk, and TAing intro engineering classes. Discussions on the future of education and learning, and where technology falls into this. I have fairly radical ideas about classroom structure (my preference: none), information distribution (my preference: everything is freely world-readable and world-writable) and student evaluation (my preference: feedback yes, grades no), but these ideas are still quite open and under formation and I love talking to people about these and related topics.

I am Chinese and my family is from the Philippines. I was the first person in my extended family to grow up and be schooled outside the developing world, and the first to develop hardware, software, and participate in internet communities. This has shaped many of my attitudes towards education, technology, globalization, and development.

• I am one of the coordinators of the OLPC Game Jam. GameJam
• I am interested in (and will probably work on) game development, the library, and local community facilitation (working with the Open Plans organization).
• I also program (primarily in C, C++ and Python, but can pick up other languages), build simple computer peripherals (primarily using PIC microcontrollers, though I'm looking to branch into other platforms), and am learning web programming and interface design. Feel free to grab me if you think I'll be helpful for a task. I live in the Boston area.

To-do list

Note that this list probably won't make sense to anyone but myself, but this is a list of things I'd love to talk to folks about; if something is cryptic and you're curious, give me a ping and I'll explain.

talk to people

• andy - caslin + nfte
• fisher - pypercard
• talk to josh about getting teacher user groups over summer
• sj - whole earth catalog orphan
• josh - free textbook project
• 5-ee: have I got a sabbatical for you / gawad kalinga
• mutopia project

check out schools

• cambridge montessouri
• waldorf school in boston
• cambridge friends

talk to teachers

• teachers (early childhood esp)
• teachers of teacher (edu profs)
• homeschoolers/unschoolers
• non-school teachers
• distance learners
• distance teachers
• textbook writers
• textbook publishers (stephanie! brother!)

things to think about

• how to make teachers feel safe?
• tracy kidder for olpc
• laptop as a peace corps project?
• Open Plans + OLPC = awesome
• From sj We should write a short whitepaper on our annotation/comment system and send it to the w3c referencing Annotea, what we took from it, and what we didn't like about it.
• read up on crossmark