Education has always been one of the main goals of Serokell. A lot of our team members give lectures at universities, plus together with ITMO, we run the research lab. Being a teacher at the Computer Summer School is another way to share experience, help children build a supportive community, and get deeper knowledge of particular subjects.“Generally, I like teaching since it’s a sort of self-education to me,” Danya Rogozin said. “When you’re explaining some concepts to people, you’re also learning those ideas deeply. Learning is unthinkable without interaction. More radically, I believe that the distinction between teachers and students is a false dichotomy. An intellectually honest teacher always remains a student. They extend their limits of knowledge and cognition together with their audience. In particular, when I was trying to explain Turing machines and related stuff, I discovered simple analogies and interactions that I hadn’t encountered before.”“I enjoy teaching, and this school gives me an opportunity to work with children who are interested in programming languages. Besides, I absolutely enjoy the atmosphere and overall vibes of the camp,” Roman Melnikov explained.However, giving lectures to students with more background knowledge differs from teaching school children. In the latter case, one needs more patience and the ability to translate complex ideas into more straightforward concepts and explain them clearly. Which, in turn, requires a much deeper understanding of the subject. According to Danya, this challenge helps become a better professional:“I often give talks and lectures full of technical details. This approach requires some prerequisites from the audience, and that’s OK for working researchers and graduate students as listeners. Giving a lecture to school children is a different story. It’s more challenging since they don’t have background knowledge on a topic. So it’s not enough to only introduce required notions (such as primitive recursive functions or something like that) formally. A younger audience needs an intuitive explanation of the idea using simple examples and analogies, which is quite a challenge for a rigorous formalist. In these aspects, an introductory lecture for non-specialists is one of the most difficult kinds of lectures. However, I believe I’ve managed to discuss with them the underlying aspects of computability quite successfully.”Danya thinks that in such situations finding good examples to learn from might come in handy:“When I was younger, I used to watch lectures by Professor Vladimir Uspensky. Except for his mathematical results, he’s also famous for his introductory lectures on computability and logic for children. So during the preparation for the Computer Summer School, I took Prof. Uspensky as a kind of role model.”Source: https://vk.com/sis.dailyAs mentioned, in Serokell, we value education and self-development a lot. We also like it when it’s fun. If you want to know more about our side activities, read about our work with younger people or dive into this article about our team’s adventure at ICFPC. And if you’d like to be notified about our new blog posts, join us on Twitter, Medium, and Dev.