[ANova Recap #2] Exploring Empowerment of Marginalized Groups and Mentorship in Tech
General Meeting #2 Recap
During our second general meeting, we had a mentorship workshop where some of ANova’s Site Leaders discussed different ways to connect with students, control the classroom, and more general teaching tips. In terms of connecting with students, we honed in on effective ways of engaging in conversation with students, like finding common ground between the mentor and student and being an active listener. To control a classroom, we highlighted the importance of differentiating between command and imposition in order to make sure that our position in the students’ lives is more than just being a teacher–we want to truly be mentors. To finish off the workshop, we talked about Bloom’s taxonomy and how to accommodate and be creative to ensure that all students, no matter how they individually best learn, gain a full understanding of all concepts.
Small Group #2 Recap
During small group this week, we discussed possible ways to uplift marginalized groups in technology: this week, we specifically focused on minorities and women. We discussed Amazon’s hiring AI, which penalized resumes that contained the word “women” based on the resumes that had been submitted to Amazon over a 10-year period. Amazon eventually edited the programs to eliminate the bias against women, but there is no guarantee that they eliminated all other potential biases the AI could have. We discussed ways in which different companies and organizations have attempted to diversify the population of people working in technology; for example, there is the Digital Pioneers Academy, which is a computer science focused academy in Washington DC where all students are black and Latino. The goal of this school is to have all students pass the AP Computer Science exam, and to achieve this, there are 5 hours of computer science taught per week and 2 hours of robotics taught per week.
Site Recap: Montera Middle School
This week’s site highlight is Montera Middle School in Oakland! This semester, we visit Montera three times per week (Tuesday, Thursday, Friday), which is the most it has ever been! There are four mentors present on each day. The Tuesday and Thursday classes are around 15 students each, while the Friday one is a bit smaller and is around half the size of the Tuesday and Thursday classes. Most students attend at least two of the three days. During these past few weeks at Montera, the mentors moved on from working with simple primitive types to lists. To introduce the concepts of lists, they used the colors of the rainbows; they had the students make their own list of their favorite Starburst flavors (which have been given out as prizes for answering questions correctly since the first week), and they taught indexing into a list as getting a certain flavor. The students also have been working on their first project: the Lilypad Lab, where students code a game that iterates through a list of integers that represents the number of flies at that lilypad and sums the number of flies eaten at each iteration to come up with a final score of flies eaten. The object of the game is to maximize the number of flies eaten when the user is only allowed to move one or two places at a time. In the coming weeks, the students will work on the Robot Frog lab, which is an extension of the Lilypad Lab with added features, and they will learn about iterating through lists using for loops.
