Anthony Ha-Anh Pham
Student, Engineer, & Teacher!
Student, Engineer, & Teacher!
I am a senior Multidisciplinary Engineering (Mechatronics Track) student at Texas A&M, and my passions involve incorporating software and hardware in learning environments to improve the quality of education!
Project Link: YouTube Demo
Bacon Hunter is my team's final project for MXET 300 (Mechatronics I) in Spring 2024. Using the given SCUTTLE robot, we designed a robot whose task was to search for a piece of paper with a certain color of green and to aim and fire the attached Nerf gun in order to hit the target. This robot comes with an autonomous dynamic obstacle avoidance system, target search and detection algorithm, gun aiming and firing system, and an autonomous movement and realignment system. I was the software developer responsible for the obstacle avoidance and movement systems. All the code is written in Python 3.
The obstacle avoidance system uses a LIDAR sensor which detects objects within a certain range and angle and turns the robot away from the object. The target search and detection algorithm utilizes an HSV filter to only look for objects that are bright green, and the algorithm also returns data about approximate robot distance away from the target. The movement system uses data from the LIDAR sensor and the HSV filter to determine the speed and direction of the robot and when to stop in order to prepare the firing mechanism.
Project Link: GitHub repository
TAO Bot is a bot that I created which helps manage my organization's (ENGR TA Organization) server! This bot is made purely with Python 3, specifically with discord.py, and lots of love! The bot has been running for over two years and is now serving over 4,400 Texas A&M faculty, peer teachers, and students!
The bot has helped a lot with ensuring the server is run as smoothly as possible while allowing students to receive help and advice comfortably. This is done with the help of the bot's several functions, including: custom help commands to help quickly relay information between staff and students, automated role selection and channel creation to organize members and channels, and integrating an office hours system with queues and Discord voice channels to streamline peer teachers' office hour sessions with students.
Project Link: GitHub repository
This model is my project for AI4ALL's Apply AI program in Spring 2023. For my project, I opted to tackle Google's Isolated Sign Language Recognition Kaggle challenge. Due to being new to machine learning and not having a strong-enough GPU to handle all the data, I limited the data to five words, and built, trained, and tested six different recurrent neural networks to try to identify the correct word based on the file data.
With the assistance of my mentor, I learned the basics of data processing and cleaning with pandas and numpy to extract the useful data and form it into input data for my models. I also learned how to use tensorflow and keras to make a basic recurrent neural network (RNN) that would train on the input data. After some testing, I would then adjust the model parameters to attempt to make improvements. After finalizing six basic models, I used matplotlib to visualize the models' performances into easily understood and comparable metrics.
Employer: TAMU's Engineering Academic and Student Affairs
Since August 2022, I serve as a peer teacher for freshman engineering classes at Texas A&M, specifically for the Intro to Computation class (ENGR 102) and Experimental Physics and Engineering Lab I (ENGR/PHYS 216) classes. I also work closely with the course coordinators to ensure that my teaching and mentoring are at their best and are based on the most up-to-date information. As a third year peer teacher, I am also tasked in helping newer peer teachers learn the ropes of the job.
In the classroom, I help students understand lecture content and their assignments while challenging them to critically think like an engineer in order to do efficient and effective problem-solving. I hope that as I do so that I can show students that learning is more than a process and a means of information collection: learning is a life-long journey filled with opportunities to better understand and to truly experience life as a participant rather than a bystander. Outside of the classroom, I am making additional videos and notes while answering questions in office hours and in the ENGR TA Organization's Discord server, home to over 4400 Texas A&M faculty, peer teachers, and students!
Programs:
Since July 2023, I have been mentoring incoming and current first-year engineering students. As an ESBP mentor, I am tasked with ensuring that incoming freshmen adapt to university life and coursework during their four-week summer stay at Texas A&M to learn pre-calculus and calculus. As a VIP mentor, I virtually connect with students to introduce them to the core basics of Python 3 in order to prepare them for their Intro to Computation (ENGR 102) class. And as a FGEn mentor, I assist my mentees with navigating through their freshman year, directing them to campus resources and providing them personalized advice.
Regardless of the program or the mentee, my focus is work-life balance. It is easy to get lost in academics, so I encourage my mentees to integrate their coursework and studying into their lives rather than letting it replace their whole identity and individuality.
Programs:
While in high school, I joined two clubs, UIL Computer Science and Mu Alpha Thea, to pursue my passions of coding and mathematics respectively. Although I initially joined to just be a member, I ended up being a tutor as well. For UIL Computer Science, I helped those new to programming with their AP Computer Science A class and those more experienced with data structures and algorithms. For Mu Alpha Theta, I tutored geometry, algebra, pre-calculus, and calculus (for both AP Calculus AB and AP Calculus BC).
Though I began tutoring in middle school, my experiences with these two clubs marked my first formal foray into teaching. It was these experiences that truly solidified and amplified my love for teaching; nothing made me happier than seeing my friends finally grasp a concept or complete a challenging homework problem. For the first time, I understood learning as a journey rather than just a means to an end, and I have since committed to dedicating my life to showing students the wonders of learning.