March 26, 2021
Almost a year ago, I entered a programme called “The Takatuf Scholars Programme”, which is a programme that offers scholarships to grade 12 students. It also offers an enrichment programme to train students while also evaluating them on all sorts of different skills, which was what I was especially looking forward to when I signed up for this programme. Frankly, I didn’t expect to learn that much during the enrichment programme, as I expected the concepts to be generic stuff that I was already familiar with, but I couldn’t have been more wrong! I learned so many new things during this programme, most of which are life long skills that I’m sure will significantly help me during my academic and social life.
At the beginning of the programme, there were a bunch of tests that participants had to do for the initial selection process. The first test was an English test that tested participants’ general grammar, reading, vocabulary and listening skills. I found this test to be particularly interesting because it was adaptive, meaning that it changed based on the test taker’s answers. I ended up getting a score of C1 which I was particularly proud of. However, I later found out that many other participants got a much higher score than me, which made me realize that I had much to improve on. The second test was an “IQ” test, as it tested general cognitive ability by seeing how participants could identify patterns and relationships in a series of matrices. I found the IQ test to be quite easy compared to other IQ tests I’ve done before, which I assume means that the programme was only looking for a certain level of intelligence, rather than the most intelligent people. Finally, an asynchronous online interview was held to test the participants’ ability to express opinion and thought, which was pretty easy for me.
After all the tests, around 30 students were chosen to enter the first phase of the programme, which was called the “Summer Residential Programme” (SRP); however, due to COVID-19, it ended up being completely online so I guess it can no longer be called “residential”. Anyways, during this programme, we were divided into groups of 4 and given assignments to finish together. I found this particularly useful because I’ve never worked with a team before in such an environment. Moreover, I found the projects that they tasked us with to be quite difficult, which really forced us to work well as a group and push our limits. Overall, during this phase, I learned how to better work with a team, how to write a research paper and many other skills like critical thinking, presentation and digital designing. It was also during this phase that I made many good friends, some of which I still talk to today.
After the SRP finished, the Individual Learning Phase (ILP) started. This phase actually started around the same time as school started, so we were required to balance between school and the programme. Thankfully though, we were only given one assignment per 2 weeks, and each assignment was fairly easy and straightforward. We were tasked to do a bunch of reflection assignments, as well as finish a research paper. I actually found that I was able to more flawlessly write the research paper compared to when I did in the SRP, since by then I already had the experience and training necessary for it. In addition to the assignments given to us, we were also given a bunch of learning sources that we had to use and were monitored on how much we used them. Personally, I regret not having used them as much as I could have, but I still benefited quite a bit from them.
Then came the final phase, which was the Winter Workshop (WW). During this phase, we went to the German University of Technology in Oman (GuTech) to live there for 9 days. This phase was by far the most fun for me as I got to finally meet up with the teachers, the staff and the other participants. There, we were assigned into groups of 4 the same as we were in the SRP, but this time it was finally in person. The assignments we were tasked with were very similar to those we were given in the SRP, but this time we had a much tighter time span to submit the assignments. For me, the only time I actually had to finish my part of the group work was at night, right before we slept, and by then I was already very tired due to the loaded schedule we had every day. This created a very stressful environment for all of us, but I believe that this was an integral part of the learning experience. Aside from the tasks we were given, there were also a lot of fun activities we did, which kind of cancelled out some of the stress we had. The WW was generally an extremely joyful experience for me! There was something really amazing about eating breakfast every morning with your peers and teachers, and then going to class together right after.
The Takatuf programme taught me a lot of new skills, some of which I use daily now. And I guess it was very stressful as well, but the stress was always followed by a lot of fun which really eased us out. All in all, being a part of this programme is something I will never forget in my entire life.
October 17, 2020
Before I was in grade 5, I was awful at English, in fact, it was my worst subject! That was why my father decided to send me to a private school called "Sohar International School" at grade 5, and although I owe a lot of my English improvement to that school, I still believe that if I hadn’t taken the correct steps, I wouldn’t have been where I am today. After all, there are many students I know who were in a private school ever since they were in Kindergarten, but their English is no better than someone who’s in a public school.
When I was in grade 5, I almost failed English with a grade of exactly 50%! However, I improved a lot that year, and the things that I believe to have been the most helpful for me that year were as follows:
Engagement: I was engaging with my English teacher every chance I had, the most important word I learned that year was “What is the meaning” as I used it all the time to ask the meaning of a certain word.
Listening: I learned that listening very carefully to my teacher would help me understand more. Even if I didn't understand a certain word, if I listened very carefully, I could understand it from context.
Then came grade 6, and during this year I was instantly a much better English speaker. I was a lot more comfortable with making conversations with teachers. I also had a much better grade that year. And the best things I learned about how to improve in English grade 6 were as follows:
Reading: Our English teacher made a system of “Reading Points”, where a student gets more points the more books he/she reads. This created a really good atmosphere for students borrowing books from each other. I ended up reading a great many books, most of which I didn’t fully understand, however, this was an extremely integral part of my English journey because my vocabulary during that year increased to a point where I could finally manage more complex conversations.
**Not to repeat my earlier point, but I increased my engagement even more since I can now manage more conversations with my teachers**
Then came grades 7, 8 and 9. During those years, I was finally able to hold good conversations with my peers. I was able to make English-speaking friends and started playing video-games and sports with them. And to summarize the things that I found the most helpful for me, here are a list of tips that I followed:
Making friends: During these years, I made many English-speaking friends, most of whom are still my friends to this day. I cannot stress enough how important this was for me, as this was quite possibly the best thing I ever did during my English learning experience. Not only was I able to make life-long friends, but it also allowed me the best way of putting my skills into use and gaining real-life experience in the language.
Joining other communities: This might be close to my previous point, and to an extent, it’s kind of a supplement to it. So what I mean by joining other communities is that if you don’t have English-speaking friends nearby, you can join communities in discord for example, where you can socialize and speak with real natives, or people who are like you and are on the same level of English as you are.
Watching movies, TV shows and YouTube: This is another thing that was a very integral part of my English learning experience. Instead of watching Arabic (my native language) shows, I started immersing myself in the English media and English entertainment industry, which made me become “one with the language” so to speak.
All in all, achieving fluency in English is not something that can be done in a matter of months, rather, it naturally takes years to do so. And as my PE teacher used to tell me, “long-term goals are just a series of short-term goals”, and learning English is no different in my opinion.
October 16, 2020
At around February of 2020, I entered a program called “Nashia Scheme”, which was basically an introductory course to programming in Python (a programming language), which was also the beginning of my programming career. The way that it worked is that it allowed for 15,000 participants from all over Oman and it was divided into multiple phases. The first phase was the course phase, the rest are testing phases and the top 200 students go to Muscat University for a learning experience.
To be honest, I never really cared about the final stages, I mostly only cared about the course. The course was divided into four parts spread across 4 weeks and it was 100% online but was very well made and well thought out. For example, the program implemented a points/leveling system for gamification that encouraged the participants to stay interested. However, it was very buggy at times, and it ended up discouraging many students because of that, that said, it was still a “net positive”. The way that the online course worked is that at the beginning of every week, they give you a set of example codes with explanation after them, and then a set of challenges related to the examples they gave earlier. I found this way to work almost perfectly for me as it holds a good balance between information input and output.
In my opinion, the first week of the first stage wasn’t very helpful, as they were teaching us how to play a game, which they created, using the command console, which ended up teaching us almost nothing about how to actually write programs. However, somewhere in the first week, they introduced us to “variables”, which I later learned are an integral part of programming, so there was at least some good in it. The rest of the three weeks on the other hand were very helpful as they ended up teaching us almost all the bare beginner basics by the end of it, as well as teaching us how to make some small projects. I ended up making a simple flappy bird game which I was super proud of, as well as a space-invader-like game, which I was even more proud of.
During this program, they also set up a forum for the participants to ask and answer each other’s questions, and there were also faculty members to answer questions every once in a while. I found the forums part to be one of the best things about this program because it gave me a sense of being part of a community of other people who are also interested in programming. I also ended up making a bunch of friends in those forums who I still talk to today.
The biggest downside of this program was the testing phases. The testing phases ended up being completely online because of COVID-19, and quite frankly, to this day I have no idea what they were thinking with the way they implemented the online tests. Without going too much into detail about it, the way that they implemented the online tests allowed for extremely easy cheating, so you ended up having people with all the answers at their disposal before they even started the test. In other words, the people who cheated finished the test faster, and the ones who didn’t finished it slower. So you ended up with most of the people in the final phase being people who cheated. This is proven by the fact that there were people who didn’t even do the required project for the first phase but still passed. I would also love to say that you should take my opinion with a grain of salt, as I could be 100% wrong about this because I didn’t personally make it through this phase, and I could just be completely biased about it.
After this experience, I learnt that the best way to learn programming is to... actually program. You can't just watch the tutorials and expect to become a good programmer, rather, you have to try to implement what you learnt in your own way, which was exactly what The Nashia Scheme was encouraging. All in all, The Nashia Scheme was a very well made and well thought out program, and it’s something I’m very grateful to have had the chance to be a part of. It is the very thing that triggered my interest in programming and encouraged me to improve my skills in it.
October 1, 2020
In June of 2020, I came across a video and in it were two of my favorite content-creators, Tyler1 (Tyler Steinkamp) and Reckful (Byron Bernstein, R.I.P.) racing against each other on who can type faster, and something about that video triggered something inside me, something that would eventually cause me to go on semi-dedicated daily typing practice for around 3 months straight. And to be honest, I’m not really sure what it was, whether it was Tyler1’s 2 fingers' typing from which I felt like I could easily get better than him, or Reckful's extremely fast 140 WPM (words per minute) typing which I’ve never seen before at the time. In any case, that video marked my start to my typing journey.
So after that, I went straight to typeracer (a website for racing in typing speed), and was actually fairly surprised that I was able to pull off an average of around 50-60 WPM, which was actually already fairly high for somebody with 0 typing practice, and it’s also already way higher than the average person’s. But then I realized that amongst real typists, this speed is actually considered embarrassingly slow.
So then I looked up ways and websites that could help improve my typing speed, and during that process, I learnt about touch typing, which is typing using all your fingers without looking at the keyboard. I also learnt about home-row and all kinds of stuff of that sort. After that, I realized that my method of typing at the time was absolutely horrible, as I would only use my index finger from my right hand, and there was no order in the way I used my fingers. In other words, my fingers were all over the place. And so, I decided I would commit to reinventing the way I typed. Right from the beginning, I set myself a goal to practicing for at least 20 minutes a day, and I kept up with that for the entirety of my typing journey.
I found this website called typingclub.com where, spoiler alert, I would later do over 360 lessons in it, spending over 6.5 hours of total time of pure typing, but it really helped me redefine the way I typed. Initially, I didn’t fully commit, I still had to message my friends and stuff like that and honestly, I just didn’t want to end up not being able to type fast while doing those things. But eventually I decided to fully commit and use home-row for all of my daily tasks, and so as you’d probably guess, I was pretty much restrained to a very slow typing speed for the first week or so of my typing practice which wasn’t exactly the best experience. And by the way, by slow I mean like 10 to 20 WPM! I was improving at a very good rate though, as I’m pretty sure I was able to get right back to my original speed in just a little more than a week.
As I finished learning home-row, my main website ended up being keybr.com, and honestly, till this day, it is still one of my favorite typing practice websites, as I do believe it is the most effective, though not the most fun I’d argue. The way that it works is that it generates random, but readable and pronounceable words using the phonetic rules of the English language, it also measures your keystroke dynamics and collects comprehensive typing statistics. For example, it measures your typing speed for each individual key, and uses this data to generate random words putting emphasis on the weakest key. And something about that system really grew on me.
After a month from then, I kept going at my regular Keybr routine with some Typeracer here and there, and my speed was actually increasing at a very steady rate. I was averaging around 70 to 75 WPM on Typeracer with scores as high as the 80s here and there. Honestly, I was overjoyed at the rate of my improvement, which was an improvement of around 15 WPM in just a month! It was also around then that I joined discord communities which would later be the main thing that motivates me to keep going. It’s also something I really encourage people to do if they are trying to improve in anything really, join a community that is interested in the same thing as you and try to improve along with other people, that’s honestly the best motivation you could possibly get.
Another month passes and honestly, this was probably my most successful month of them all. I was able to get 100 WPM many times, and pull off an average of about 90-95 WPM, an increase of yet again, about 20 WPM in just a month!
All in all, I didn’t do this journey just for the fun of it, in reality, I did it for myself, I did it because speed typing is an actual skill that can and will most probably help you. And in the case of myself, it actually does help, from being able to message my friends faster to being able to write code faster, not to mention, it also would help me in writing my English homework and stuff of that sort. All in all, it’s a skill that is undoubtedly worth developing. I am very glad I did this journey, because I came out with something truly valuable from it.