Editor’s note: Mark, a self-starter and aspiring software engineer, joined us over a 12-week period as a teaching and curriculum design intern. Although his internship stint was short, he took it upon himself to learn as much as he could and blew us away with his adaptability and courage. We enjoyed your unwavering spirit, and we wish you the best of luck, Mark!
Do you ever pour boiling soup into a cup and think to yourself, “Wow, this is taking really long to cool, if only my liquid was in a container of greater diameter, giving it more exposed surface area to lose heat from?”
Bowls. Aren’t their breadths great?
Tinkertanker was my (rice) bowl this summer. I listed “AI and ML stuff” as one of my interests, and got the chance to work on a wide breadth of related projects:
- DSTA Generative AI Camp
I got to make some of the curricula for the 2023 Young Defence Scientists Programme (YDSP) Science & Technology (S&T) Camp. It aimed to educate students from various schools in Singapore about generative AI.
Example of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) models shown to students
I had to Google a lot more about diffusion models, GANs, neural networks and Pytorch so that I had sufficient knowledge to explain to the participants.
Example image of output from a diffusion model Jupyter Notebook shown to students
Animation showcasing the diffusion process (and also what I see in my head when I’m trying my best to sleep at night)
We also had to design activities that would simplify, but still capture the idea of the models, so that the participants could more easily grasp the concepts.
At the end of the event, there was a competition where students had to showcase their own generative AI prototypes. I was quite impressed by the technical performance of some of the teams and found myself inspired by them to explore further in the field of AI.
- Streamlit Curriculum
Some of the other interns and I made some example programs to showcase to students the ability of frameworks like Streamlit, an open-source Python framework used for convenient machine-learning web apps. We got the chance to play around with the limited access OpenAI GPT-4 model (which Tinkertanker had access to).
Using OpenAI API’s function calling ability alongside the Spotipy library to get song recommendations, using Streamlit as a front-end
Custom image generator using OpenAI API and Streamlit
- ISCA Curriculum
Wait, isn’t ISCA the Institute of Singapore Chartered Accountants? Yes, even they are not outside the reach of Tinkertanker’s teachings.
I got the chance to assist and make curriculum activities for classes at ISCA about AI — from content like how accountants could use ChatGPT for work purposes, to things like Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and UiPath to automate certain parts of their workflow.
We introduced the accountants to features like Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for documents, allowing them to convert text from documents and invoices to machine-encoded text, before processing the text graphically or in a summary.
Dungeons and Dragons
Not a work project, but I got the chance to try Dungeons and Dragons for the first time thanks to my fellow interns Natasha and Triston.
Character sheet from dndbeyond.com
Other activities
Apart from the ML/AI content, I also went down to Crescent Girls School to assist with the lessons involving the M5GO microcontroller. It’s interesting to see the development of tech and programming education in schools, and I would say it does feel meaningful to be a part of it.
I also got the opportunity to help out at DSTA’s Brainhack 2023 competition held at Marina Bay Sands. Not only did I get the chance to see various participants present their apps, but we also got to see DSTA showcase their ventures in robotics, drone programming, simulations, and more.
Overall, I felt like I had an enriching 12 weeks working at Tinkertanker. There were many experiences to try something new and learn more, be it another programming language, tech stack, or design practices. Due to the nature of Tinkertanker as a tech education company, it has a wealth of resources you can make use of to expand your technical knowledge. It’s a different experience from the traditional software engineering job, and I appreciate its role in broadening my horizons.