So I recently ranted about a gap that I noticed in a few engineering students that I interviewed here. But complaining is easy. Understanding the problem and then trying to solve it – that takes effort. Thankfully, I got an opportunity recently to be part of the solution.
Symbiosis Artificial Intelligence Institute SAII (साई) recently reached out to me regarding a Linux hands-on workshop for their BSc students. This is not what I usually train folks on. My primary focus when it comes to trainings is enabling organizations to leverage AI. But I like Linux and I thought to myself “What’s the point of just complaining on LinkedIn that the education system needs some improvement and then not doing anything about it?” So I happily agreed.
While preparing the material I could have created a simple vanilla slide-deck combined with a “follow-my-steps” kind of a workshop. But would that really be useful? By just copy-pasting commands from a notebook or git repo would the students really understand the power of the Linux terminal? So instead, I created an escape-room kind of workshop.
Anika Pandit (my ex-intern) helped bring my thoughts to life in the form of this presentation. And I used Claude to create this puzzle-style workshop here. What’s different about this? After explaining the basics to the students, I guided them to setup the workshop on their VMs. Then they had to work solo or in pairs to solve each level of a 15-level puzzle.
I was quite pleased with the end-result. Rote memorization was of no use here. The kids needed to understand the commands and actually try them out to clear each level. They were trying out things and failing. And then trying a bit more and THEN succeeding. This is what I wanted.
I’m of the strong opinion that we should get kids to read from books to learn really well. So my co-authors Nixon Kurian and Khushboo Patil agreed to donate a copy of our best-seller book on AI to each student who would clear all the 15 levels.
A special thanks to my partner-in-crime Auxilin Fernando for taking time off from her work to come help me with this large batch of students.
If you are new to Linux or think you are a pro, how about you clone my workshop and tell me how many minutes it took you to clear all 15 levels? I’ll accept that you are a pro, if you wrap up all 15 in under 15 mins.
