Story By Manika Casterline
While summer vacation is synonymous with surf and sand, two Freehold High School students who are both residents of Marlboro Township have an alternative answer to how they spent their break.
Liezl Puzon, a junior in the Medical Sciences Learning Center and Nicholas Lum, also a junior in the Computer Science Academy partnered up to form Team Freehold and won third place in an online education competition sponsored by Udacity.
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Udacity is a website that provides free college level courses online and range from a beginner’s level course in Introduction to Computer Science to an advanced level course such as Applied Cryptography.
Puzon and Lum’s challenge was to sign up students of any age for Udacity courses. Every time a course is completed, a point would be gained for their team.
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“I actually do believe in free online education and I think it's pretty revolutionary, especially college-level courses that are being offered to give us an edge. I have participated in Coursera and MITOpenCourseWare before this, and I have never seen such a clean, helpful program like Udacity,” said team lead Puzon.
Team Freehold completed more than 750 units and signed up about 80 team members.
The top seven scoring teams, which came from across the United States as well as the Dominican Republic and the United Kingdom, won an all expense trip to California from Nov. 2 to 4, 2012.
Puzon and Lum received the opportunity to tour the offices of Udacity and the Stanford Artificial Intelligence laboratory. They also got to ride around in the Google Self-Driving car. “The ride was an amazing experience! The Google Self-Driving car is the car of the future’, said Lum.
According to Puzon, part of her motivation to win the Udacity challenge is to meet Sebastian Thrun, a former Stanford University professor who is now Udacity’s CEO. “Sebastian inspires me to expand my learning experiences through self-paced university level courses offered by Udacity”, said Puzon.
