Discussions

Discussions in learning device will happen like this. First of all there should be an initiator for a discussion. There is 4 type of discussions. Intra-school ( For discussions among the students and faculty within a school. This type of discussion does not require internet. Wi-Fi enabled devices will do the connectivity among students within that school), Inter-school ( This is restricted to schools upto higher secondary or whatever you call it in your country. Like before college. There can be discussion between any school between any countries.). Third is for colleges ( Between colleges of any country ). Fourth is research. Except first, all the other 3 requires internet connectivity. Before going to the discussion rooms, the content got from a school should be stored in an external hard disk ( Memory in TB) ( to be kept by student and updated daily ). When a particular year is over, all the contents will be transferred to that disk and kept for future reference. One external hard disk for every year.

Discussion rooms will be initiated by an administrator and can be moderated by few. The moderators and administrators will have the full content of discussion in their disk. When they come online, the discussions can be further expanded. Anybody who wants to participate in the discussion should be accepted by the administrator or moderators after going through their profile. The Profile will have their name, picture and school or college details. The device can only be bought by an academic institutions and distributed to their students with authentic information about them. In the discussion room there will be no name or number pointing to any person. There will only be queries and answers. After the discussion, the person who answered well and got most star rating by peers will get more credit points. Calculation of credits will be a background operation. Participants will not know who answered what. It is only the content that speaks. More points for intra-school than inter- school. More points for Colleges than inter-school. More points for research than Colleges. And also if a person having more credits for himself and he gives 4 stars to your answer, you get more points. Anybody can participate in any Discussion room provided they have got invites. There is one more advantage, anybody who is using this device can look at any discussion and download it to their device, provided the discussion is not private. If private, only the participants can view.

The discussion starts like this. When somebody asks a question “What is 1*2”. The invitees to the discussion press follow-up. First participants says “It is Multiplication. The method of adding first number times the second number”. Second participant says “This symbol is seen in multiplication table”.       

  

Any participant can click on the box. The Box opens and you get to view its contents. Upon viewing this box, every participant must rate it. From 1 to 4 stars. If he has doubt in that content, he must click on the query button to view all the queries in that particular box. If his query is not already present he opens a new query. In this case “what is addition?”. If participant feels to add more to the answer, he can do a follow-up, like “Basics of Maths”. This is very simple representation of discussion rooms. The boxes can be filled with Text, Video, Audio, Animation whatever to add clarity to the topic of discussion.

The advantage of this discussion setup is that nobody's follow-up and answer is lost. This is more effective than people sitting in a room and having discussion. No shouting. No losing anybody's precious views or great ideas. And also anybody who views these discussions will be greatly benefited.

Microsoft in the field of education

                          I have a suggestion to Microsoft in the field of education. We can develop a class room learning kit, which can be used not only inside the classroom, but also outside to the world of academicians and learners around the world. Microsoft can acquire or collaborate with learning companies to give contents to the school as well as students in its own class room learning kit. All the things which is taught through black board or through the learning digital contents will be recorded and available to students. They can access this in home or in school hours. Let's take a typical scenario in which a student can not understand a particular topic or wants more clarity in a topic. If the teacher fails to give a satisfactory reply( which happens in underdeveloped and developing countries more often), he can clarify his doubts through the following procedure. He can take the video content and stop the video where he has doubt( Either black board taught lessons or through digital content) and ask his classmates or other teachers or the content providers or anybody in the world who has bought this class room learning kit. He can draw and scribble his doubts in the video and add audio to it with an enhanced MS Office ready for next generation. Then post his doubt in the platform developed by Microsoft. You can also interact and learn with your classmates through this classroom learning kit, by sharing your own ideas in that content( black board or digital) and maybe your own way of solving a problem. School students can also do their homework with this device and submit it to their teachers through internet from anywhere anytime.

This product is not restricted to school students, but can be used by all students, no matter whether they are pursuing under graduation, post graduation or research in a reputed university( of course a different version with advanced features). The advantage of this device is that it can help any student in even a very small underdeveloped country to get guidance from other fellow researchers or professors in any country. We can develop a chat program, with rooms created for every major topic. So some student from Africa can chat with a Stanford scholar and get an invite to discuss on a topic through the class room learning kit. Any researcher can have a video discussion with any other researcher with device, not just through cameras but also sharing their ideas through our advanced MS Office which runs parallel along with camera, so that you can express your thoughts and ideas through sketches and animations.

And also if someone wants to teach on a subject for money or for the love of teaching to under privileged students he or she can do through this device. If u have a habit of helping others with your knowledge, you can earn credits from the beneficiary of your teaching skills. More credits if you get a thumbs up from somebody who himself has more credits or from an established professor from IIT or IIM or Harvard. With those credits you can buy things in our device like subscription fee or some digital content. If you are a darling in this platform and have got more credits, we will give you a certificate on your score or link it with job search portals like linkedin to help you get a great job. But this product is only for students and researchers who are in academic institution approved by their management.

All this for a minimum subscription fee along with the cost of the device. This will make Microsoft the pioneer in the field of education. I would like Microsoft to share its profit and technology with under privileged students in Africa, so that they come out with flying colors and make their country a developed one.

AI : Can Machines be creative?

I don't think anytime in the future machines will become creative. Trying to make machines think and provide a solution which never existed before is a huge task. Instead with all the computing power coming in small processors ( In the future it will be more ), we should teach machines to find solutions through already written algorithms. Machines should be taught to analyse algorithms. That is machines should be able to break algorithms into pieces and combine the pieces of algorithms to find a new solution. Those pieces can come from any of the huge number of algorithms from anywhere. This new solution did not come out of creative thinking, which I don't think machines can ever do. But through the human being's wisdom. In my view this science of making machines understand algorithms is gonna be the next step in Artificial Intelligence.Thank you. God save human beings from terminators. Ha ha ha.

National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET)

It is totally unfair to bring NEET exams to states where CBSE syllabus is not taught widely. But if Medical council of India wants to make students who pursue medicine to be qualified, It can make NEET as qualifying test instead of making it the single most eligibility criteria to enter medical courses. The qualification marks required to clear NEET should be set by the Medical council. Admissions will be given to 3000 students who pass NEET but admissions will be given based on their cutoff got by 12th standard state board marks. So it serves both the purpose, Medical council is satisfied by their qualification in NEET and students in Tamilnadu( and some other states) will find it reasonably acceptable since their cutoff marks(got by 12th exams) is the important criteria to secure MBBS and BDS admissions.

Nice device to put CSR money

This idea i am going to give is neither revolutionary nor profound, not even going to make money. But it will help persons with vision disability. Though, these kind of devices are available, we will throw light to its existence, so that it is widely available at a low cost, instead of spending money in braille books. If a person who is visually impaired wants to read a document or book or any kind of letter, he can use this hand scanner and text to speech converter to read aloud (or use ear phones) any book, any letter or any kind of printed documents. The device may also be designed particularly to read books. Turn pages automatically and read. The user will have buttons to Play/ Pause/ Rewind/ GoToPage/ GoToChapter. They can use voice commands also. The technology required to make this device is very much available. We just need some will from Governments and Corporates to make these devices( may be as part of CSR activity) and provide it free of cost to visually impaired persons.

Algorithm behind Division - Kid's Time

Long Division

What is Division? It is the process of splitting a number ( dividend ) into chunks of another number ( divisor ) and calculating how many pieces (quotient ) have been obtained as the result of division.

Example 6/2 = 3

Now , we will discuss about the long division. We will divide 1334/2 and the result is 667.

The idea behind long division is to find the most significant digit of the quotient which will fit in its place in every iteration. In this example, we first check first digit of dividend( 1 in this case). It is less than 2 and with that we will not be able to find the most significant digit of the quotient. So we move on to next digit. Now, we take 13. We divide 13 by 2. Now the most significant digit will not exceed 6 and will not be less than 6. Why? Because no matter what digits or how many digits follow 13, when we divide it by 2, it has to 6xxx for any 13xxx ( or 6xx for 13xx, for any number of x, the same result holds). In the next step, we are passing the remainder of 13/2 to next significant digit.

For Example. if we divide 92/4, the most significant digit will be 2 (got by calculating 9/4 and next significant digit will be 10 + 2 ( 10 carried from remainder of first digit calculation)  = 12/4  = 3. First digit 2, second digit 3 Answer is 23. The idea is like multiplication, where we pass on 1 of 12(result of least significant digit multiplication) as 1 to next digit multiplication. In Division, we pass 1 (remainder of most significant digit division) as 10+2 to next digit division.

So, coming back to previous example, when we divide 13/2, it gives the next digit 6, then 1 goes to next significant digit as 10+4. When we divide 14/2, We get the next digit 7. The result is 667.

We can understand this through another example -  1445/5


First, We take the number 14 ( the left most digits of dividend which is greater than 5). We divide it with 5 to get the left most digit ( Most significant digit ) of quotient and pass on the remainder to next digit. When passing we multiply the remainder with 10, because when shifting right to the adjacent digit, the value increases 10 times no matter the place of the digit. Then we add the remainder multiplied by 10 of the previous digit with next digit right of it ( Next significant digit). We get 40 + 4. Then again we divide 44 with 5 and so on. The process continues and in every step we get one digit of quotient ( In the order from left most to right most digit). We need not worry whether the first digit of the quotient( Left most ) is in 1000th place or 100th place or whatever, because at last the quotient is going to be filled with exact number of digits ( produced at every step ), which divides the dividend.



For better understanding, Consider this

Algorithm behind Multiplication - Kids Time

Multiplication

What is multiplication? It is the process of adding a number to itself as many times as given by the multiplier.

Example   2*3. Add 2 with itself 3 times.  2+2+2 = 6

 Or            3*2. Add 3 with itself 2 times.      3+3 = 6

Example   3*5. Add 3 with itself 5 times. 3+3+3+3+3 = 15

Or             5*3. Add 5 with itself 3 times          5+5+5 = 15

With that basics, We will move on to two digit multiplication.

Example  23 * 24 = 552. Add 23 with itself 24 times. 

That's bit lengthy. So we will break it into pieces.

Add 23 with itself 20 times + Add 23 with itself 4 times.

23 * 20 + 23 * 4.

We know that 

To add 23 with itself 20 times = (Add 23 with itself 2 times) * 10 = ( 23 + 23 ) * 10 = 460

Now

Add 23 with itself 4 times. 23 + 23 + 23 + 23 = 92

The result is 460 + 92 = 552.

Now we will learn about the process of multiplication.

Another Example