Teaching Information Theory with Minimal Equations to a High Schooler

Blog, Information Theory (Winter 2021)

By: Rebecca Wong (rwong01@stanford.edu)

I had the opportunity to mentor a lovely high school senior, Sam, who I got connected with through my old high school physics teacher. Sam is taking physics right now, but she intends on studying political science in college and is interested in law and social issues. Even though her main interest is not in a hard science or engineering discipline, she is broadly very curious and a voracious learner who loves learning and taking an interest in courses and topics outside of her immediate interests, for which I’m very grateful for as it made our conversations engaging, and challenged me to translate very math-heavy topics into something she could understand and appreciate without the math background overhead.

Instruction on writing a blog (winter 2021)

Blog, Information Theory (Winter 2021)

For those who enroll in the course EE276, you will deliver your outreach project in the blog format here. Your blog should contain who you mentored, what topics you taught, how the typical interactions looked like, and any challenges or interesting experiences you encountered. Your blog may be organized in any way – but make sure that the public (who may have little background on your specific topic of the blog) can understand your blog and clearly see what you did! 

A few remarks are in order:

  1. Authors: Please indicate your name in your blog as the author;
  2. Category: In the “Settings” icon, please check the boxes of both “Blog” and “Information Theory (Winter 2021)” as the category of your blog;
  3. Attachment: For files and images, you are encouraged to upload your source files to your blog. If you’d like to share a link, please make sure that this is a permanent link so that it can still be visited years later (e.g., your Stanford spaces may expire after you graduate). For video attachment, please upload it to Youtube (or any other platforms) first and share the link here. For projects involving computer programming, you do not need to upload your source codes, although feel free to share a link to your GitHub repo.
  4. Math formulae: If you would like to use latex for math formulae in the blog, you may type [DUCK] your latex formula [/DUCK] for inline expressions, and [DUCK display = “true”] your latex formula [/DUCK] for a separate display mode. (When in use, please replace “DUCK” by “latex”.) 
  5. Publish: Please publish your blog before the project deadline (midnight on March 21, 2021). Also remember to publish publicly so that other groups may see and comment on your blog.