Culminating Project: Phylicia’s Paradox

My project is titled “Phylicia’s Paradox”. It is a curricular + pedagogical design for a community learning experience on the mathematics of recommender systems, designed for a general, intergenerational audience and intended to run at the Black-led Black Creek Community Farm in Toronto.

Recommender systems quietly shape what people watch, hear, buy, and believe. The core problem the project addresses is that many people experience them as “magic” or manipulation because the underlying math is invisible. The workshop is designed to make the math legible through the body and senses, using an explicit learning arc: Reading (representation → similarity → ranking → feedback loops) and Writing (changing signals, weights, constraints, and success metrics).

In the detailed outline that you can download, I describe deliverables and how I will design and try out the workshop. The deliverables include a facilitator guide, participant handouts (including low-text, accessibility-first options), an outdoor activity kit with adaptations for weather and mobility, optional visuals (slide deck/cards), and assessment/documentation tools (exit tickets, reflection protocol, photo documentation guide), plus a math appendix that keeps the equations and pseudocode accessible. The design is guided by pedagogical commitments that function as constraints—especially embodied/multisensory learning and outdoors/place-responsive learning—so the abstractions (vectors, similarity, ranking) can be physically instantiated rather than left as symbols on a page.

Draft outline (Feb 9), Draft project (Mar 9), and a completed polished package (by Mar 24) with visuals, accessibility notes, and reflections after iteration.

The annotated bibliography explains the sources shaping the project. Each entry clarifies what the work contributes and how it informs my design choices. The aim is to keep the workshop technically solid, while teachable to a general audience.