Sunday, January 22, 2017

Week 1: The Beginning

Hello!

My name is Omar Sanseviero. I'm a CS student in Mexico City, and currently I am in an exchange program in UC Berkeley. I always say that I have two passions: education and computer science. I strongly believe that education has the power to solve most of the problems that currently affect our world. Educating ourselves and our community means empowering the society. My second passion arrived some years ago, when I started programming. They say that programming is the closest thing there is to superpowers, and it actually feels like that. I've been able to work making websites, doing AR applications, and creating simple AIs, and it feels like pushing our knowledge further and further. Sometimes we put ourself lots of impositions: we say that we can't do some things because we don't have enough money or that the hardware is not advanced enough to do it. To be honest (and obviously money still is a really important factor), I think that the only limit we have is our creativity and how decided we are to get the things done.

So, being like that, I always try to combine both passions and work in technological projects related to education. When I started my undergraduate degree in Mexico City, I entered a hacker school named DevF. After that experience, I've been really interested in working with communities. Since then, I have imparted web development courses in my university, created (and failed with) a startup focused in offering high quality CS education to hispanic countries, and traveled to different cities with Microsoft to give workshops about Kodu, an educational technology to teach children how to program through gamification. All of this experiences are for a reason: I believe that education should have higher quality and be accessible to all the people. I think that a huge part of our current education system has a really wrong focus and fails in its primary intent.

I still don't know what I want to do as a class project, but I saw lots of potential in some of the patents. I'm really interested in the whole process of creating the startup, and I think that this might be a great experience to learn how to get the things done. I really hope that we get to get the minimum viable product, and to see all the class participating in this engaging experience.










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