An artificial intelligence expert looks back on lessons learned on her Castilleja robotics team
This article appeared in the 2024 edition of Full Circle, Castilleja's annual magazine.
Victoria Dean ’13, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Olin College, has a rule: she does not touch her students’ keyboards or robots.
“Even if it takes the student longer, my goal is not to tell them the answer, but to let them figure it out for themselves. So much of learning how to program is learning to debug and find the errors in your code. As much as possible, I try to guide by just asking questions,” she says.
Cultivating problem-solving skills is something Victoria learned on Gatorbotics, Castilleja’s robotics team. “We didn’t have mentors touching the robots, and that’s something I carry with me now,” she explains. “We had this culture that it’s a student-led team and mentors weren’t there to dictate the path that we were going to take.”
When she joined as a 9th grader, the Bourn Lab didn’t exist yet, but Gatorbotics was already going strong, with roughly 30 members. Victoria loved it so much that through the years she convinced her parents she should stay later and later in the evenings at team work sessions.
She learned skills that translated to her academic work, especially around teamwork and mentoring. “You’re frequently faced with a challenge that feels totally new and isolating, but I learned about the power of collaboration through working with mentors, seeking answers in an online robotics forum, and making friends on other teams,” says Victoria. “Having a leadership role also helped me think about how to teach content to other people and engage them in the work.” On summer weekends, she hosted programming workshops at her house and served as team programming lead during her junior and senior years.
Victoria believes that attending a girls’ school empowered her to combat gender bias in STEM. “I’m not sure I ever met a woman who was a programming lead on a co-ed First Robotics team,” she recalls about competitions when she was on the team. “I just remember at competitions people would doubt I was the programming lead. That lit a fire inside me.”
Devoted to the scientific method as a way of life, Victoria even wrote her senior speech about experimental baking and, fittingly, wore a math-themed apron as she presented it. “I rarely stick to a recipe,” she explains. “I like to try out different ingredients and ratios.” At Olin, she remembers her advisees’ birthdays and surprises them with homemade treats. Her most popular creation? Pie made with fresh-picked apples. Her favorite kitchen accessory? An apron festooned with π symbols.
As she looks to the future of artificial intelligence, she is particularly interested in real-world impact. “Having students play around with real-world data and applications of machine learning is both useful and exciting,” Victoria says. She already has students working on projects for local partners, including analyzing air quality data for the Roxbury-based environmental justice group Alternatives for Community & Environment. “Machine learning can help in potentially surprising ways beyond traditional applications of robotics and computer vision,” she says. “I think that we can motivate the next generation of researchers to do even more impactful work.”