Interview Report: Khalil

Khalil lives in Ramallah and attends the Ramallah Friends school. He grew up in Kufr Neeme and returns weekly to visit his grandparents and other family members living there. For the past three years, Khalil has been a volunteer teacher with his brother at the Childrens Happiness Center. Khalil teaches village students the basics of programming (HTML and CSS) and basic English. His brother assists him with the English lessons and his brother also teaches piano. The schedule can be quite intense. Khalil teaches at the school daily for two weeks straight every year, instructing from early in the morning to 4 or 5 at night. He described the curriculum in great detail. The first year, his students learn basic C programming, in the second year they learn problem solving with C++, and in the third year HTML/CSS.

Khalil emphasized that teaching students how to learn, or basic self-directed study skills, was a critical component of his personal approach to lesson planning. Every group had a different project that they would work on. Often, these applications were very relevant and practical. For example, some students made restaurant websites for their parents. Khalil also described...

For example, some computers did not work properly and had hardware issues. Khalil and his brother could only fix four of them, even using the help of some of his mentors from the organization Code for Palestine....…for other developers.

I asked Khalil if there was a problem that he had come across that he would like to solve. He told me that there was a lack of access to new technology and technology education in his village in Palestine. The village children he worked with suffered from a critical lack of resources, in contrast with the students in Ramallah.

Finally, I asked Khalil why he had applied to MIT. He started by looking at the list of courses and professors and believed MIT had one of the most demanding yet compelling curriculums. He knew MIT students use their technological educations to foster positive change in the world. Similarly, he would like to address the technological limitations he witnessed in…