Teaching
I used to be a bad student who lacked interest in pursuing knowledge, until my middle-school teacher changed my life fundamentally and I became hungry to learn. That is why I believe a teacher has the choice and the power to do much more than merely teach the course material. Teaching is not the passive delivery of what students should know; it should motivate students to learn actively and think reflectively. And learning is not mechanically memorizing information — it is digesting it into one’s own knowledge, ultimately in order to solve problems.
I think of a course as a pirate ship setting out for the ultimate treasure: the instructor is the captain, the students are the sailors, and the goals are made clear before leaving port. The captain motivates, trains, and sometimes pushes the crew through lectures, labs, and final projects; the sailors follow instructions, work as a team, and think reflectively about the problems that come up — because without everyone’s enthusiasm and hard work, nobody reaches the destination by the end of the semester. In practice that means a survey and a quick review at the start so everyone is on the same page, a “muddiest point” check after each lecture, groups built from complementary strengths, rubrics released the day an assignment goes out, assessment weighted toward labs and projects, and recorded lectures and extended readings that hint at current research. And, as the old Chinese saying goes, live and learn: I keep sharpening my own teaching so that I can be a teacher who not only delivers knowledge but inspires students.
Courses
RBE 549 · Computer Vision (graduate) — Fall 2022, Fall 2018
Co-designed and delivered the Fall 2022 edition of the course, covering classical and deep-learning approaches, with weekly lectures and office hours supporting student projects (course site).
RBE 3001 & 3002 · Unified Robotics III & IV — 2020–2021
Supervised the hands-on labs — kinematics and control of a 3D-printed robot arm, mobile-robot navigation — and designed and graded the final projects.
RBE 1001 · Introduction to Robotics — 2017–2018
Managed and mentored a team of five undergraduate peer learning assistants; designed and graded projects, lab reports, and homework.
Certification in College Teaching, Higher Education Consortium of Central Massachusetts (HECCMA), 2017–2019.
Mentoring
At Harvard I advise student researchers in Prof. Na Li’s group on algorithm design, system evaluation, and reproducible methodology. Outside the university I coach school robotics teams as a certified FIRST Tech Challenge coach (2023–2024) and a certified REC Foundation coach (2024–2025), guiding students through robot design, programming, and competition strategy. In the 2024–2025 season I coached Vinci STEAM’s middle-school VEX team 10102Z, which won the Middle School World Championship at the 2025 VEX Robotics World Championship in Dallas.