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
