 think tech away civil engagement lives here. Good morning my name is Ray Tsuchiyama another program all about leadership I have today a guest all the way from an island called Maui where my father was born and raised and we met in 2011 in fact the same year when I relocated from Tokyo to Maui and he is with the mathematics department of UH Maui college his name is Amir Hossein I'm a Zalani and he's been working on teaching mathematics teaching all kinds of subjects in an innovative way and we're going to talk about that and but first off I want to say welcome to the show thanks for having me it's my pleasure to be here well let's go back in time Amir and where were you born and raised I was born and raised in Tehran Iran 40 years ago almost and so I actually got my high school diploma my bachelor's and my master's degrees all back home I got my bachelor's and master's in electrical engineering control systems then after that do you want to ask a question or should I continue let me be the host but before we go into your graduate studies when can you say that in your in your schooling or teacher or something that says wow I'm passionate about numbers and mathematics when did that happen? Well a couple of things first of all culturally in Middle East in general and in Iran in particular you're successful or at least you are considered successful if you're a doctor an engineer or a lawyer so there is some sort of pressure on you to succeed at least scientifically and go as far as you can because of that there is some sort of well mostly healthy sometimes not so healthy competition among students to get accepted to better institutions to go as far as they can and so we really took science education and math education among other things seriously was there a teacher that you remember? Yes yes we had good teachers but also we because we were serious about because the path to success for us was studying and it was sort of establishing our minds so it was internal I mean students like you came to class wanting to learn math and science exactly and that was I mean the path to success as I would know would be that I would love to learn more about mathematics more about physics more about science in order to succeed later so there was a hunger it was hunger exactly and your classes were they very large small I mean relatively large I mean in comparison with say classes at UH Maui College I sometimes have 10 to 15 students we were like 30 30 something in high school all right for about university depending on the course if it was a core course like calculus or something 120 in a lecture hall but then for more specialized courses fewer like 15 20 now for your graduate school you went to of course you got a masters in in Iran but you went for your PhD in Canada am I correct where was that it was in a city called London Ontario University of Western Ontario a very good university I started there as a student in electrical engineering but then and that was the thing I've been always interested in the theory behind engineering why things work as they do okay and of course you have to know about the mathematics behind it the science behind it and that was too strong for me I guess so I decided to switch to applied mathematics which is you know it's practically engineering minus the design part because you work with computers you design techniques everything semiconductors and coding and so it is everywhere exactly you can simulate all these things like I said even if you like you can go further and design it right right but you were interested in product you was interested in how does it work yeah what is the foundation for how products are how can we tweak things to make things better no that's amazing that's amazing and and this led you to teaching yes well in general well my personality is such that I like teaching I like research I well I guess I consider myself a lifelong learner so I always love to learn and of course you've been publishing papers research peer review journals over you continue to do that but but today we're here to really discuss your passion about about an area in in in education and what what did you talk about that and how you care or your early interaction with a problem-based learning in Canada that led you to today sure well as a PhD student back in I want to say 2004 2005 I got accepted to a program called IPSW industrial problem solving workshop it was a two-week program for graduate student and postdocs where the first week was a dry run someone with a problem that they had already solved would be the mentor of I mean let's say we are 40 students divided into five groups of eight for example so five mentors each with a already and already solved problem right but they pretended to be an open problem and they would give it to us and we would be working on that for one week that was the preparation for the second week when we had an authentic real life open in the problem safe for example from Shell from some cancer research institutes from the private sector yes private sector they were interested in seeing how people from the outside in academia would approach this problem and well we had really good results sometimes they would otherwise have spent like millions of dollars to address the same problem that got solved for them in a week and sometimes the answer was no there was no solution so they wouldn't invest right and it's better sometimes because you save money and direct your funds on another research topic and let me tell you it was a win-win-win situation for everyone as a grad student I got exposed to real-life applications of mathematics it was a great opportunity for instructors for faculty members to recruit grad students postdocs among those participants it was a great opportunity for those companies so higher right right right after graduation so it was and of course it was a great opportunity scientifically for everyone working on a real-life problem practicing what you've seen so it's a really a bridge between the private sector research right students instructors it's really a kind of ecosystem that you develop working together so that you really have a really you know a mathematical foundation to problems but you're approaching problems from the real life from the exactly and because you're in a group for one thing a good thing about that is there's no competition you all have the same goal addressing the problem solving the problem and the problems are interesting problem well yeah you mentioned that it first originated in the medical community problem the idea okay so here's the thing after a couple of years I got hired to run this program which was a great opportunity as part of my postdoc and back then I was amazed by how well it works how effective it was but I couldn't explain it and my background was not education so I talked to some of my colleagues from college of education back then at University of Calgary in Canada and they told me that the best way to explain this would be problem-based learning and so that's how I got exposed to the idea of problem-based learning which I continued okay and and so you you really were exposed to this world called problem-based learning back in Canada and you land here at the UH Maui College back in 2011 and and you must have seen Maui as a grand experiment for your ideas that you had honed you know leading these groups on Maui but Maui of course is different because there aren't many universities and postdocs in part of it what what changes did you make to the model on Maui well as you said the first and foremost thing would be scaling down because we do not have it's not like it back in Canada it was a nationwide thing and you had there were always enough students more than enough students grad students postdoc here on Maui there are not very many grad students to begin with and so we decided to make it something a program for high school and early college students to begin with and what I did was I sort of looked for people who might be interested in the idea fortunately back then the director of our Upward Bound program which is part of Trio something funded by DOE I believe right and she was really supportive of the idea so we piloted this at that level for three years three summers when did it start all right I want to say the first one was 2013 or 14 yes yes and then after three years so the first one I'm going to explain that later if you want but the first one was a problem so again we did not necessarily have access to Shell right I mean there are companies on Maui and also cultural sites and things like that so we approached the CoEAEA fish bond and asked them to supply a central problem because for problem-based learning you you need an authentic central problem and that problem came from the fish bond and where is this fish bond can you give me in key hey all right and and it's way up more towards McKenna am I correct yes and and it's been there for hundreds of years yes and it used to be a great and amazing source of food for the entire Maui so it's related to history yes culture the culture also to well sustainability they were they were growing fish to sustain themselves to feed the entire island without having to rely on any external support right so it's a brilliant use of the ocean for their to feed the community and now this is an interesting problem because of course you have major hotels nearby residential key hey is of course one of the most populated areas on Maui now and also how to preserve and how do sustain such a project when you know you've lost a lot of those traditional kinds of learning since since before well we're going to get back to more in depth on that but I think you know what I'm learning is that it's is that it's interdisciplinary I think I think that that's one of the major things I'm learning from you it's not like it's all about math it's it's math is part of that and we'll get back to how the students use math from after we take this break we're back with my guest Amir Hossain Amizlani from UH Maui College an old friend and we've been talking about problem-based learning and how to really attack problems and we're talking about a fish pond in Kihei that I'm quite aware of and how what kind of students and and and what happened during this project what was the outcome well not the outcome but how did the students use the tools and resources and what was the outcome of this project well let me explain a little bit about the theory behind problem-based learning why it works the way it does it's based on two main theories in education constructionism and situated learning let's put it this way if you are working on something that is near and dear to your heart the problem from your community from your city from your country right so your goal is to solve that problem right and then it happens that you need some mathematics in order to solve that problem you need some physics some science of course yeah you actually welcome that mathematics that physics you learn without noticing you learn what you're enjoying because your goal is not just learning mathematics through possibly dry lectures or physics you own the learning process and it's important for the teacher which we should call actually a mentor in this case to refrain from lecturing it's it's about being a team working on a problem it can go in any direction we have to recognize that there may be several solutions to the same problem depending on how you look at it so from execution standpoint there's a lot of frontload preparation for that we have to interpret the problem correctly we have to make sure that we've sort of anticipated the scenarios that may come out the type of questions that students may ask and we need to have resources ready that's why there's a lot of teacher preparation yes in that sense and that's why we have a training for trainers professional development thing for the teachers instructors of this program but it's important to note that it has to be a teamwork everyone must enjoy what's happening and for that to happen we need to select the problems really carefully they need to be authentic related to your community your city so the fish pond fits all those categories yes given that a high percentage of the participants were from native Hawaiian background it was really a great experience for them they loved it they worked on it they even learned about things like say double integration high school kids before even entering college which is something they would see in calculus three or four they just saw how they would find the volume of the pond using strings and push prints for example and measuring the depth some random points inside the meshes that they had created and they added up and with a good accuracy they got the volume of the pond which is technically what we know as double integration now one could show them the same thing through limit and sigma and I don't know taking the limit something x n goes to infinity and things like that which is great I mean I'm not saying that it shouldn't happen that way but when you've done this before and you've seen this in action you can relate way better another thing that I would like to highlight here is that and I guess you mentioned as well it's not really right to say that I teach calculus through problem-based learning or I teach physics it's not about one subject or one class we're talking about I mean if you really want to change the curriculum it has to be one semester or one year revolving around one central problem so then you are ready to expose them to the physics of it right so the ideal case would be a super class for learning community of sorts where the physics instructor is there the math instructor is there the chemistry biology so the physics instructor says f equals m times a at the same time the math teacher can say something about this is the secondary for example and this is how we solve this part of the problem using this knowledge but of course there's other parts of puzzle or the problem dealing with politics with the neighborhood dealing with people cultural issues so you're correct that in real life things are not neat and clean in three or four months it might dribble and then kind of accumulate and then stops and goes over a year or more and that's real life and that's what our job is about in project management in Google or AOL or many companies I work for it's that it's not very clean but again you know what you get to know what you don't know also and try to get the experts and resources or find out on yourself and so you actually are learning as you proceed on your project exactly and that's why when we train the trainers we expose them to the same problems that they would be working on with their students in the summertime first of all then we make sure that we have one teacher from natural sciences background one from physical sciences in its broad sense and one helping them with technical writing and cultural aspects because culture is important because again that's about situated learning if the question if the problem the central problem is related to your culture right you feel better tackling the problem now we were talking about this before the show that you felt that the students on Maui are the same anywhere but what they lack sometimes is confidence exactly and what is the confidence is it themselves in their community what is the confidence well I believe and maybe I'm wrong but that's based on my observation they think that no one expects that much that high of them they sell themselves short I mean in the sense that they can do great things if they want to and we've had some really great examples of successful students studying coming from Maui high schools we know one of them right CRQ University we have MIT students we have UCLA student and so it's possible for them they need to be challenged and they need to gain confidence that they can do exactly as any other student everywhere and of course thanks to technology nowadays they don't really need to go to any particular class they don't need to physically attend a class to succeed to learn things now your efforts in this area has been rewarded recently by the by the government the NSF Greg can you tell us something about how you're kind of moving this idea forward throughout the state yes so like I said we piloted this problem-based learning through or Upward Bound program just on Maui after three years fortunately we got an NSF grant over one million dollars for three years and now we have three sites UH Hilo Upward Bound Winboard Community College Upward Bound and UH Maui College Upward Bound so over the course of these three years we hopefully work with 90 students per year so 270 students it will take and also we train teachers because part of this program is a professional development and it's a good opportunity to advertise it for STEM teachers across the state of Hawaii so you're evangelizing other teachers to also pick this project-based learning also in other areas of the community yes yes I mean we're not forcing them necessarily to choose that but this is a great idea and we need to create a culture that is acceptable to that for example let's say assessment if you train kids using this method it's not fair to give them the same test that you would give to students that are taught to the test well it's not fair because right but here we are trying to address these through this three-year implementation or let's say research phase hopefully after that we would like to go for a five-year implementation phase as well if this becomes successful but time constraints because one thing is like I said if we can make the entire curriculum of the year revolve around a central problem that would be awesome but what we have only five weeks right but this is a great concept that's what you're trying to prove a concept and perhaps in the future the university and colleges could also be revolving so that they would be attacking a problem through one year two years or more throughout their college career and applying tools and resources exactly that's the plan I mean that would be your idea for us well thank you so much we're at the end of the show but I think what you're driving toward and I hope you're evangelizing will foster a whole new generation of instructors we'll take this forward and as you know upper bound economically challenged you know young people from communities like Kali Hiplama where I'm from too and but as you as you rightly pointed out if you're passionate about the problem you will learn anything exactly solve it if you can relate to the problem at hand nothing really seems impossible to you you won't get bored you keep working you keep trying and you succeed thank you so much thank you this is Ray Tuchiyama all of our leadership and I hope you enjoyed the show