[ANova Recap #3] Intersectionality and Economic Inequality in the Bay Area
General Meeting #3 Recap
During our third general meeting, we began by reviewing intersectionality and the standpoint theory, which states that personal viewpoints and knowledge are shaped by unique experiences and social position. Dividing up into smaller groups, we discussed the ways in which tech industry and education are exclusive in relation to four categories: race/ethnicity, gender/sexuality, socioeconomic class, and (dis)ability/education. Each group would talk about one of these categories with respect to the current topic. We honed in on these categories for the rest of our small discussions, switching categories with each new discussion topic. Other topics we discussed include the ways in which we as individuals can make tech spaces more equitable and inclusive, how understanding these four different aspects of identity can help us be better mentors at our sites, and the ways in which diversity of the tech community has improved in recent years and what still needs work. We concluded our discussions by discussing how a student’s identity in relation to these four aspects may affect their fixed vs growth mindset, and what we as mentors can do to most benefit the student.
Small Group #3 Recap
This week’s small group’s theme is economic inequality in the Bay Area. We began our small groups by talking about Google and Apple, and the ways they have been using the billions of dollars worth of property in the Bay; for example, Google is working on projects for more housing and public transportation in San Jose. We discussed the role tech companies play in the housing crisis in the Bay and the ways our students may be affected by this. In East Palo Alto, the median home price is over one million dollars, while the median income is $55,170. Realtors have been giving offers of cash to try to buy homes in the area; landlords are evicting and imposing rent hikes. For the past two years, StreetCode Academy has been working to help local kids in the Bay learn to code, working to increase diversity in the tech community and create more equal opportunities for students of all backgrounds in East Palo Alto. In the last bit of our small groups this week, we discussed how the outsourcing of labor by tech companies contributes to the growing inequality in the Bay Area, and ways in which we can help advocate for these workers, whose average salaries are $19,000 while the average salary of those employed directly in tech is $113,000.
Site Recap: Lighthouse Charter School
This week’s site highlight is Lighthouse Charter School, which is our new site this year! We visit Lighthouse Charter on Wednesdays from 3:30–5:30. Four mentors go weekly, and there are around 20 kids in the class (17 boys and 3 girls); most of the students in the class are in the sixth and seventh grades. During the first few sites, the mentors learned that most of the students have a passion for video games and are interested in hacking, thus the mentors developed their curriculum in a way such that it involves a combination of hacking and video games to tailor to the students’ interests. These past few weeks, they have been teaching variables, Strings, and comparators in Python. The class is generally very excited and hyper, so in order to effectively and efficiently facilitate class each week, the students are divided up into groups of around 6 when mentors are teaching new material. To teach variables, the mentors made a project that was called “Hacking Fortnite” in which the students had to find the variable that was holding the hacking password and insert that password so the code would eventually output “Fortnite has been hacked!”. To teach logical comparators, the mentors used Fortnite weapons as their demo: the students would suggest ways in which they can compare the amount of damage done by each weapon, the bullet capacity, etc. They used this demo to introduce using booleans as the result of their comparisons. The mentors had the students end class by experimenting by themselves or in pairs with setting variables, resetting variables, using correct syntax when creating, printing, and modifying Strings, and using logical comparators to compare their variables.
