Meet the Teaching Team & the Team Behind the Team
Our teaching team consists of an instructor, Winter, and two TAs, Sammy and me. We first met during the Summer Immersion Program teacher training in May. We spent the weekend familiarizing ourselves with the curriculum, discussing the classroom environment we wanted to create, and getting to know each other. Training helped to familiarize ourselves with the structure of the curriculum and the purpose behind its different components. Hearing how its creators intended its components and teacher notes to be used gave us a familiarity with the curriculum that has allowed us to dynamically interpret and adapt the curriculum to the needs of our classroom as we move through it.
The more we work together, the better three of us understand how to best utilize our strengths and personalities in the context of our team, and maximize how we use our roles to benefit the students. At the end of each day, we evaluate how the lesson went based on journal entries from the girls and our own observations. This has given us a better understanding of how our students learn most effectively and how we can adapt the curriculum to best suit them.
(R) Winter and Sammy with keys to their new home or touring the lot?
This week we introduced our students to Python, their first experience coding with a text-based language. Learning Python is like learning to ride a bike by learning to ride a tricycle first. Like a tricycle, Scratch is relatively easy to pick up and hard to fall off of. It is fun and exciting because it creates instant, visual results. After Scratch, it can be difficult and frustrating to switch over to text-based languages, which are very particular about syntax and logic, and take longer to get used to before you can utilize them to their full extent. When you're first learning, it's really easy to fall off a bike a lot and write code that produces a lot of errors. While this is frustrating because there are things you could make your code do in Scratch that you can't initially get your code to do in Python, eventually languages like Python will be able to get you farther than Scratch could. We know that coding definitely isn't easy, and we could tell our students experienced this frustration after their first day of Python and decided to spend Tuesday reviewing Monday's material instead of moving on.
On Tuesday, we revisited Monday's concepts by creating new examples of code and walked through it as a class. We even spent extra time prepping the following lessons, after realizing how we could tailor the lessons even more towards our class. Slowing down paid off, as the girls expressed that they were much more comfortable after spending a second day on the concepts. I'm glad we spent the extra time reviewing Python, as it showed them that they were capable of grasping difficult concepts and encouraged them to be resilient in pushing through a week of challenging lessons and projects. By the end of the week, they had coded a Text Adventure game, Hangman, and a ChatBot!
Despite the effort we pour into the class, our teaching team cannot run this program on our own. We rely on an incredible support system provided by Girls Who Code and Warner Bros. We have a site lead who oversees all of the Girls Who Code Summer Immersion Programs in Los Angeles. She visits our site once a week, provides logistical and administrative assistance, is our liaison with Girls Who Code headquarters, and supports us in any other ways she can.
Additionally, Warner Bros. has been extremely welcoming and involved in the program. Our main Warner Bros. contact is the human resources manager, who has been incredible to work with and completely invested to the program. She has scheduled field trips, speakers, and workshops, organizes the lunch deliveries, coordinates the logistics of us being able to have a classroom in the Warner Bros. Technology building, and visits our class every day to check in. There are many employees who want to volunteer with the program, and she has made sure that our girls get to meet as many women who work at Warner Bros. as possible, whether it be by having them speak and share their story, hold a workshop, accompany us on a field trip to the lot, or serve us lunch for a week.
This past Friday, we were able to attend an Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality Demo where we were able to try Harry Potter and Batman augmented reality apps, IT, Fantastic Beasts, Lego, and Fruit Ninja virtual reality games, and the Anki Cozmo Robot. Cozmo can be programmed by its user with a Scratch-based program, and the girls were able to use what they had learned during the first week of the program to do so. Workshops such as these are a fun and interactive way of showing the girls applications of computer science to technology that they use.
The girls in this program have a very large group of people who believe in the importance of what they are doing, care about their success, and want to be involved. I feel incredibly lucky that I get to invest in them by being with them in the classroom every day!