Updates, Reflections, and Plans for the Future!

We’ve been offline for a while, and for this we apologize. Here is what our last month has looked like:

2/15 – Snow Day, Session Cancelled

2/22 - Session Completed

2/29 – Session Completed

3/7 – Northeastern Spring Break, No Session

3/14 - Session Completed

3/21 – Snow Day, Session Cancelled

We are a little behind in our lesson plan due to snow days, and since our first session this lesson plan has been altered and adapted many, many times.  The coding channel on our slack account is a constant whirl of activity.

One major change in our teaching methods has been the shift from issuing imagined challenges to issuing tangible challenges utilizing physical objects. For the session on March 14^th, the team used folders and tape guidelines on a test table as a maze, and the students were able to test their code on the maze, and make adjustments accordingly. The response was incredible: it brought out their competitive spirit and make the lesson exciting. We have discovered the importance of activities in the classroom, and will work to continue to incorporate this in the future.

We maintain that interacting with the students is the most rewarding aspect of the project. We had mentioned in a previous blog post how driven some of our students are, and this continues to amaze us. We have worked to make the environment free and friendly, such that the students can be themselves. As a result, the volunteers have been able to get to know the students on a more personal level. One of the students is working on mastering a sixth language, another plans to build his own robot for his school’s science fair.

Their learning paces are different, as are their reactions to success and failure. Some students are eager to get their hands dirty, understanding the tasks before we even begin, while others wait until we arrive to help. Some students react to their success with excitement and delight, and display visible frustration when faced with a particularly challenging task. Others, to our confusion, wear the same expression the entire time. But they come back, week after week (even when we mess up the pizza order).

Our volunteers have been so good to us – incredibly flexible, ultra-adaptable. We recognize the difficulties of having a program that runs from 3:00 pm to 6:00 pm on a Monday afternoon, but luckily with eight we can send less if a major exam is coming up. We are working on an exit interview strategy. We plan to have a meeting with all of the volunteers on Sunday, April 3^rd. At this meeting, we will first have them fill out a survey for the program. This survey will encompass their opinions on the students’ comprehension and satisfaction, their personal comprehension and satisfaction, and how well the coding team taught the material. We plan to then have a recorded discussion with the group as a whole, using the survey to guide the discussion.

We have a session coming up on the 28^th, so watch out for a recap on that blog post!

See you soon,

B&B

2/1 Session Recap: Unexpected Problems and (a few) Solutions

We had our second session this week. We’re quickly discovering that our best practice to expect the unexpected. We’re learning flexibility with the dedication of a contortionist in Cirque Du Soleil.

Our lesson was drastically different than our pilot program. We only had two returning students when class began. We grouped Anaiza and Fritz together, and encouraged them to continue on to lesson three. The remaining four began lesson one in pairs. Later Raheen, TJ, and Malakai joined the group. It seems late arrivals will be a normal occurrence, as some students may have after school commitments, or may have to walk from home if their guardian cannot pick them up. Because of our situation, we have decided to begin our lessons using only three of the bots, and saving the remaining three for late students. We anticipate that this issue of tardiness will persist throughout the program. This course of action allows later students to begin the lesson with other tardy students, so they start on the same page rather than jumping into an already developed group lesson.

We expected that the students would experience some difficulties using the program. The program is intuitive to a certain extent, but the students are struggling to learn the interface, and as a result some actions take longer, particularly configuring the settings. This can only be solved with experience. As the students learn the interface, their interactions with it will become autonomous.

Students are also experiencing issues understanding the order of operation when using the programming blocks. We will need to takes steps to remedy this, as it is essential for upcoming lessons.  One of our volunteers mentioned that there are certain mentoring strategies we can adopt. The team aligned that when a student asks for help, they must first explain to the mentor their actions and the reasoning behind them. This gives the students a chance to both cement their knowledge via teaching and to catch their errors.   

Team leadership noticed that the Northeastern volunteers are struggling to convey the lesson and answer questions about the lesson succinctly and accurately. In order to head the problem off early, we are altering our bi-weekly volunteer meetings, encouraging more hands on time for the volunteers, and potentially having them teach the coding team the lesson after they learn it. Similar to how we hope the students will cement their knowledge by explaining their choices, we hope that by teaching the coding team, the volunteers will be more confident in their knowledge. We will be sticking to bi-weekly volunteer meetings, as we cannot ask for more of their time. However, we will send weekly emails to the volunteers with the lesson, and encourage them to read and review it before the Monday sessions.

We are looking at potential snow day tomorrow, so we may not have a session. We will keep you posted on the goings on of our program and team.

See you on the flip side.

-Bits&Bots Team

P.S. Why was the computer cold?

P.S.S. It left its Windows open. =P

1/25 Session Recap - Pilot Program

They say "better late than never," so with great apologies we wanted to post our pilot program recap: 

They say to expect the unexpected. We could cite the girl scouts here and say “be prepared,” but sometimes you think you’re ready for anything, and that Frisbee keeps getting bigger and then it hits you.

Ow.

(So we’re a little dramatic.)

We expected students who had no background in computer science. We expected low to medium interest, students looking for something to do.

They were interested. They were curious. They had that relentless perseverance and determination to see and hear and absorb and understand. Some had worked with EV3 before; others had knowledge of python. One student spoke three languages and is currently testing out of 6^th grade.

They flew through lessons one and two. We will have to completely re-work our lesson plans for the next seven sessions. We will incorporate new sensors, and more challenging programs.

It was a fairly small group. We definitely are not at capacity, and we probably will not reach it during the winter months. The librarian told us that in the winter students do not stay as long because the sun sets so early.

But ohmygoodness we are so excited!

Next week we will start implementing our volunteer survey, debriefing after each session, and tracking trends, but for now we are absolutely thrilled.

A Brief Definition

Blog

[bläɡ]

NOUN

1. a regularly updated website or web page, typically one run by an individual or small group, that is written in an informal or conversational style.
2. synonyms: online journal/diary

That shouldn’t be too hard. Really, we just wanted somewhere to write about our process: what went wrong, what really went wrong, list of things we ought to do, our progress so far...

We want this to serve as a testament that we have grown and changed both individually and as a team. We want proof of the struggle, a scale to measure the weight of what Bits & Bots means to us and what it can do for the community. It's more than the your cliched buzzwords. Change. Growth. No.

We are using this blog so that we can modify, revise, and refine this program.

We want this to thrive.

Introductions

To cut the introductions short and sweet:

We are Bits & Bots. We are a team of lifelong learners, dedicated to promoting the STEM fields to under privileged 5th-8th grade students in the Boston area. Essentially, we are a group of overworked and sorta-kinda-really impassioned college kids who want to make a difference in the world. Love us yet?

Our team has 11 students, all of whom attend Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. We are computer science majors, engineers, and business majors. Some of us are minorities in our fields, some of us traveled the nation to attend this college. All of us are part of the Northeastern University Scholars Program. We also have 7 volunteers, 6 of which are members of the Black Engineering Student Society (BESS).  

We have many on-campus organizations that support us in our efforts. They include:

• Northeastern University Scholars Program
• Black Engineering Student Society
• National Society of Black Engineers
• Northeastern University Center for STEM Education
• Northeastern University Civic Engagement Program

We’ll be operating at the Grove Hall branch of the Boston Public Library. You’ll see us there on certain Monday afternoons (we’ll post the schedule later). We chose Lego Mindstorm Robots Ev3 as the to teach robotics and programming to our students. There will be eight sessions, where small groups will tackle a small “byte-size” aspect of programming using the Lego Mindstorm Ev3 Robots. Our volunteers will mentor the groups, and help them along the way.

Our first session is today, so wish us luck!