These Qiskitters Are Starting an Open-Source Quantum Education Not-For-Profit
When I tried auditing a physics major course as a computer science undergraduate as a freshman at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), the professor told me the course was for majors only — and so, impulsively, I had to become a physics major. I soon realized that there isn’t an easy way for many of us interested in quantum computing to get the tailored education we want.
Today, I’m working with others to build an open source quantum education repository and community for people who don’t have access to a quantum computing major track or educational resources at their own schools, with the help of other Qiskitters, quantum developers, and the Unitary Fund. I encourage you to check it out at https://fullstackquantumcomputation.tech.
During my personal journey, I felt that my knowledge of quantum computing was all over the place. I tried to take every course I could that would get me closer to becoming a quantum computer scientist, from computer science to physics to math to chemistry courses. I was worried that my major track and accompanying research experiences would pigeonhole me and keep me away from quantum computing, which I couldn’t simply major in. Finally, I interned in the Quantum Undergraduate Research at IBM and Princeton (QURIP) program last summer and started to chart my own path, running a student-led seminar exploring topics I wish I’d learned in a classroom setting.
I don’t think this problem is going away soon. Based on my and my peers’ experiences, it might take over a decade for large public universities in the United States to develop the infrastructure to teach quantum computing at scale. As with any emerging area, it takes time to hire faculty, train students, develop much-needed curricula, and work around bureaucratic barriers. On top of that, according to the U.S. National Strategic Overview for Quantum Information Science, “America’s current educational system typically focuses on discrete disciplinary tracks, rarely emphasizing cross-disciplinary study that equips graduates for complex modern questions and challenges, prominently including QIS.” What are students supposed to do as the infrastructure develops?
This interdisciplinary nature of quantum computing makes learning it a unique challenge. Every student has different needs due to differing experiences with programming, quantum mechanics, and other separate topics. Plus, even experts can benefit from introductory learning materials, because experts in different subfields, say, a complexity theorist and a materials scientist, may struggle with communicating their research to each other. The interdisciplinary nature of this field requires an open and interdisciplinary approach to learning it. After all, to literally invent, build, and scale a new type of computer is a challenge no one person can hope to achieve on their own — a giant unsolved puzzle for humankind.
Today, undergraduates are trying to find their own workarounds. For example, Jayanti Singh, a computer science engineering undergraduate from India, self-learned quantum computing because such courses were not offered at her university. To impart knowledge about the technology to the local community, she is working on establishing a Quantum Computing Knowledge Club at her university’s students development cell for beginners with no prior exposure in Quantum Computing. Meanwhile, Kevin Joven, an electronic engineering student from Colombia, found out about how quantum computing combined interests he was passionate about including math, physics, electronics, and computing. He then shared his dream to research quantum computing with his research advisor, who supported him applying quantum computing to their lab’s research using electrical impedance tomography to detect breast cancer. Claudia Zendejas-Morales, an undergraduate in BS physics (UNAM) and BE computer engineering (UAEM) from Mexico, shared in a blog post on our site how she learned quantum computing entirely from the internet.
Free, open access solutions to quantum education are ideal for folks charting their own path like Jayanti, Kevin, and Claudia. For students who are already learning in a course setting, open access supplements existing material by helping fill in gaps in their prior knowledge, as well as letting them explore beyond the course topics. For people self-learning, it gives them the resources, guidance, and confidence to learn according to their interests at their own pace. Open access online learning materials also offer the opportunity for community building. Online learning is typically accompanied by communities to help one another understand when one gets stuck, and to share learning resources new to one another. Someone learning can really understand how to help another get started.
Of course, free online learning is an opportunity to create inclusive and accessible education for people from disadvantaged backgrounds, enabling anyone to dive into a topic in an environment without tuition or judgment. For the first three years after I learned to code, I did not have any womxn mentors or teachers who were programmers (and since then, have taught middle school level programming courses where I’ve noticed classes frequently have few girls). I insist it is a societal responsibility to create learning spaces that are accessible and welcoming, especially in a field like quantum computing where both physics and computing face a dearth of representation from marginalized people. As my mentor Professor Margaret Martonosi at Princeton University wrote, “there are increasingly better ways to find support remotely, to make up for insufficient diversity in your geographic home base. […] The point is that finding common cause with a broad set of people about communities that feel inclusive is important and can be very rewarding, and goes way beyond the visible majority/minority status you can see most easily.”
This past summer, some of us Qiskitters met in a discord channel of the Qiskit Global Summer School, where we realized that we were working on lots of really cool projects and were excited to share with each other and beyond. Thanks to a grant from the Unitary Fund nonprofit, we are building a website at https://fullstackquantumcomputation.tech for anyone to help develop community-driven, open-source, accessible quantum learning materials across all areas of the quantum computing stack. How to contribute is pictured above! Anyone regardless of age or location is welcome to contribute, whether it’s a new educational resource not yet developed that you would like to propose, or a completed educational resource that has never been publicly accessible online before. This could be writing an article, recording a video, drawing a comic, adding writing next to slides to be a stand-alone resource, creating a board/card/video game, open-sourcing lecture notes, explaining a programming project, a resource on professional aspects of being a quantum researcher, or any other ideas you may have.
Our growing repository of curated open-source learning materials include an introduction to post-quantum cryptography by Rodrigo Pires Ferreira from Brazil, a QonnectFour quantum game made by Praveen Jayakumar from India, a lecture on commonly implemented two-qubit gates for superconducting qubits by Rahul and Sagnik from India, and introductory quantum programming tutorials and cat comics introducing bra-ket notation and Hilbert spaces by Alberto Maldonado Romo from Mexico. We also have educational posts about projects from contributors, such as the quantum random number generator created during the Qiskit Hackathon Global.
All are welcome to our Discord server for people interested in quantum universal education as a space to ask questions, e-meet others, and hop in to our live workshops and beginner-friendly journal club. Join link https://discord.gg/NDm9e9W
Lia Yeh is a Qiskit Advocate amid her Computer Science DPhil study in the Quantum Group at the University of Oxford. She is very passionate about STEM education and outreach: she co-founded WomxnHacks, an annual weekend-long hackathon for ~200 female-identifying and non-gender-binary college students of all levels of programming experience especially none; and is currently building and curating community-driven, open-source quantum science+computing learning resources at https://fullstackquantumcomputation.tech.
