teaching — Erica Ji Yuen

Inspiring Curiosity and Building Intuition

As a first generation college graduate, I am passionate about empowering students of all backgrounds to make the most of their curiosity and creativity through education. In early high school, my first volunteering and job opportunities were in teaching. I used to spend my summers teaching 5 year olds how to read, 12 year olds how to dissect star fish, and 85 year olds how to send photos to their loved ones. In my lifetime, my teaching and original curriculum designs have impacted over 1500+ students globally. I’ve taught students in Mexico, China, and the Middle East, empowering the youth in each region to apply design thinking and technology to improving their local communities.

When teaching, I emphasize have two main goals for my students: inspiration and intuition. Not only do I try to make sure my students have a solid understanding of the material, but I make sure to that they learn how to further their own growth after my classes. I provide extra support resources to those who need it, and also create open ended explorations to those who could use an extra challenge. Every student has their own strengths and style of learning - and I differentiate my teaching styles so that each student reaches their full potential.

Inspirit AI

REmote 2020 - 2022

At this AI Education startup, I led the creation of elementary and middle school courses in Artificial Intelligence. These courses are a mix of Today in AI Talks, coding with Google Colab Notebooks, and game design with Scratch, taught live online with a 5:1 instructor to student ratio. To date, 600+ students have taken these courses, and I’ve trained 100+ instructors to teach these courses. These courses are designed for students of all coding backgrounds, focusing on training models for real world applications, understanding data, and ethical nuances of machine learning.

Student Testimonial:
"This course was amazing! I did not know how I would feel about it because I was never the biggest fan of computer science, but this was one of the best experiences I have ever had! This opportunity was given to me by my school where I never had a chance to learn about this. I have learned so much and love showing what I've learned to my family. I feel like I can really make a change in the world with what I've learned, and even though I never thought of pursuing this in high school and college, I really think I could. Thank you to all the instructors for an amazing experience! "

MIT

Cambridge 2019 - 2020

During my MEng at MIT, I was a Teaching Assistant for graduate level courses: Computational Photography(6.865) and Intelligent Multimodal User Interfaces(6.835). For these couress, I prepared and administered coursework, graded problem sets, and mentored 300+ students for their final projects. My average rating from subject evaluations was 6.8 / 7.0.

Topics covered in Computational Photography (taught in C++):
Denoising and Demosaicing, Convolution and Bilateral Filtering, Resampling, Warping and Morphing, Harris Corners, Features and Automatic Panoramas, Image Processing Optimization using Halide

Topics covered in Intelligent Multimodal User Interfaces (taught in Python and Javascript):
Sketch Understanding, Body Tracking and Gesture Recognition, Face Recognition, Speech Understanding, Affective Computing, Cross Modal Understanding

meet@MIT

Jerusalem 2021

MEET (Middle Eastern Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow) is an educational initiative that has created a powerful network of young Israeli and Palestinian leaders who are changing the political and social landscape in the Middle East.

During the summer of 2021, I taught web development to Israeli and Palestinian high schoolers, fostering a safe collaborative environment and inspiring change.

Topics taught: Flask Routing, Databases, Front-end Web Development, and Design Thinking

Lean On Me is a non-profit organization founded from MIT that provides anonymous peer to peer text hotlines for emotional support on college campuses. To help build their community, I created educational materials about effective communication and mental health. As someone with lived experiences with recovering from PTSD and a bipolar disorder misdiagnosis, I focused on creating community-based approaches to support mental health wellness for crisis prevention.

I launched Lean On Me’s Instagram account with 1500+ followers in 3 months, fostering college community conversations about peer support, trauma recovery, mood disorders, eating disorders, addiction, self-compassion, and coping mechanisms.

I also storyboarded and oversaw production of animated videos. Additionally, I mentored 5 high school interns in creating an AI mental health chatbot to help train peer supporters, giving peer supporters feedback on their empathy and listening skills.

Lean On Me

Remote 2020

MIT Beautiful Patterns

Chihuahua, Summer 2018

Mexico City, Summer 2019

Beautiful Patterns is a collaboration between MIT and Tec de Monterrey to encourage high school girls in Mexico to pursue careers in technology.

I led week-long workshops for 50+ students introducing them to design thinking, algorithms, and web development in Mexico City and Chihuahua, Mexico.

By teaching my students to approach problems in their local community and apply technology and design thinking skills, students feel more empowered in their ability make a change.

Society of Women Engineers

Cambridge, MA 2014 - 2018

During my undergrad at MIT, I was on the Educational Outreach Board in Society of Women Engineers (SWE), where I design and run workshops to encourage children and young women to pursue STEM fields. Workshops included Science Saturdays at the Cambridge library to teach 5-6 year olds, and organizing design workshops with the Cambridge Science Festival, and representing MITSWE at the New England STEM Festival in Rhode Island.

I also collaborated with the MIT Global Poverty Initiative, where I developed a curriculum to teach students in the rural Philippines about web development. A big challenge with this initiative was to provide students with lesson plans that did not depend on stable internet.