Joyce He
I was born and raised in China. In pursue of a wider perspective and better understanding of the world, I went aboard and studied A-Level in the UK when I was 16. Grew up in an environment with limited opportunities to study social science, arts, and sports, studying at a different country opened up my eyes and let me explore areas I could never have thought of. I was fascinated by the things I’ve learned from my psychology and sociology A-Level classes and ultimately went on to pursue a degree in Cognitive Science with a specialization in neuroscience from the University of California, San Diego.
During my time at UCSD, I continued to explore my interests, develop skills and test my potentials. During my first three years there, I packed my schedule with a variety of classes, worked in a cafeteria and multiple student organizations, and volunteered at different cognitive science research labs. Fun fact… I decided to pursue a second degree in Marine Biology in my junior year without any prior knowledge in biology and oceanography. I’ve love the ocean and always dream of becoming a mermaid and live in the sea (mostly when I was younger). Despite the opportunity costs (finishing college in four years instead of three), deep struggles to learn something completely new, and knowing that I might not pursue it as a career path, giving all I have to learn something I love is deeply rewarding.
I worked in three different labs in the Cognitive Science department and read broadly in searching for an area that I want to focus on. Though none of the labs or projects I encountered specializes in learning, attention, and memory, I discovered my passion for learning science and wanted to use my knowledge in Cognitive Science to bring better education to the world. As one of my favorite professors from Cognitive Science, Dr. Tu, teaches Machine Learning and Deep Learning classes, I also started to develop great interests in Artificial Intelligence and took almost all classes in available then.
By the time I graduated from UCSD, I had became very comfortable taking risks and work days and nights for things I care deeply about. My path also became a little bit clearer to me. Though I’m still trying to figure out my life, I found my north star—to bring quality and equitable education and learning experience to all.
During my senior year, my passion for education and machine learning, and my connection with peers, led me to find a group of people who shared my passion. Together, we worked to create an educational platform to teach people about artificial intelligence with an emphasis on machine learning, a project which we later turned into a company. Recognizing that many of our fellow students are eager to work in AI or use AI in their fields of study but have minimum theoretical and programming backgrounds, we built our course materials with only the most essential knowledge in small logical chunks. To make learning more effective, we created intuitive graphics and animations to illustrate abstract concepts and complex mathematical operations; we also provided both formal and informal assessments to engage learners and track their progress. Although we stumbled as entrepreneurs, we became better students, instructors, machine learning engineers, and designers.
Just about every part of our project was a challenge. Even with extensive reading and online classes, I found it hard to discern the best online teaching practices and incorporate them into the design. It was also the first time I realized how challenging it was to turn ideas into designs and test them, as there were so many practical constraints. For instance, we had to give up several assessment testing ideas due to the shortage of software engineers to develop them in our web-based platform, and sometimes we had to trade the quality of design for streaming quality. Picking up new skills was also very challenging—it took me days to make illustrations and animations for our tutorials and hours for me to write codes that could generate aesthetically appealing data visualizations. Luckily, all of us were driven; we were able to deliver our first batch of online tutorials this past summer and found partners from China to further test and improve our products.
With my partners planning to further their studies in graduate school, I was inspired to extend my study of learning science and gain formal training in design. I want to seize the opportunity to equip myself with more knowledge and skills—to become proficient in all that my father never had the opportunity to learn and join him in his quest to reform Chinese K-12 education using learning science and technology as our allies.
It’s truly an honor to be a part of this amazing LDT 2019 cohort.
