TDSB Co-Op Program

As part of the experiential learning program through the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), high school students can elect to take a cooperative education (co-op) course for credit. This program allows students to get a sense of what the day-to-day is like in a career field they find interesting. Through a partnership between the TDSB and the University Health Network (UHN), our lab offered co-op placements to students interested in the research sector.

I designed an 8-week course to cover the basic concepts of reinforcement learning (RL) at a level appropriate for senior high school students. I presented course materials in the form of Jupyter notebooks, allowing students to work through example problems and try their own solutions. We set clear and concise goals for each week, conducting small experiments and discussing the results and limitations at biweekly meetings. At the end of the 8 weeks, students produced a report on what they had learned.