CS + X

This week was the first week that I did not get to see students with the Upward Bound program, so I was able to reflect on the curriculum and send a reflection report To Professor Gertner.

CS + X

It is hard to believe this is the last week with the students and the last week of the Upward Bound program! The goals for this week were to have students complete the silly sentences linguistic project and to create and finish a presentation for their celebratory, end-of-program banquet.

CS + X

On Tuesday, we brought in Kathleen on a Zoom call to explain the concepts behind the project. Similar to the first session, she introduced the study of linguistics with relevant examples for the students. This session, we noticed that the students were not as engaged during the hybrid lecture portion of the lesson, so when we finished this activity we decided to switch gears to complete the “English Grammar Quiz” Kahoot.

CS + X

On 7/06, I was able to meet the next group of Upward Bound students! There are four students in the class, two freshmen and two sophomores, and while they are excited to get started, two of them noted they were anxious about computer science, as they had tried it in middle school and found it difficult. With this in mind, Sophia and I spent a long time on ice-breakers and introducing computer science. We made sure to keep our explanations accessible and asked the students to brainstorm and share ways that they interact with computers and technology. They enjoyed most of the questions in the “Get To Know You” Python program, especially the one that asked to plan the perfect meal.

CS + X

The focus this week was helping the students create a presentation for the celebratory banquet at the end of their program, which was a great opportunity for the students to reflect on the work that they have done. The presentation is meant to be a comprehensive explanation of the topics we covered in class, all the personnel involved in this program and classes, and their thoughts and reflections on their experience. I designed the outline for the students, so they were able to spend time writing and reflecting. In addition, they also spent a considerable amount of time on the design and background images on their slides, which made me smile because I enjoyed watching them explore the themes and create their own to best represent themselves.

CS + X

For Upward Bound, we started off our Tuesday session with reading an article about unexpected responses from a chatbot. The article recounted the author’s experience asking a chatbot to consider its “shadow self” (a psychological concept by Carl Jung). The author noted that the chatbot started answering questions differently, and less professionally, and the chatbot began to convince the author to leave his marriage in favor of starting a relationship with the chatbot.

CS + X

The first session of the Upward Bound started this week, and we met on Tuesday, 6/13 and Thursday, 6/15 with our six students.

CS + X

Again a busy week as we prepare to teach our first cohort of Upward Bound students on 6/13! Sophia and I have continued to make adjustments to our existing materials as well as formally write up lesson plans.

CS + X

This week was busy with considering student strengths and needs, designing lesson plan materials, and collaborating with team members.

• Daily Dojo
  • We know from psychology and learning theory that students need to engage with and practice new skills frequently, so I created “bellringer” activities meant to be completed at the start of class. I researched exisiting curriculum and theory from computer science teachers and created my own interpretation based on what I know to be successful learning activities from my time as a teacher.
  • There are four mini lessons designed to have students continuously practice their Python and problem-solving skills and are intended to take between 10 -15 minutes at the start of each class: Dictionaries, NLP, Machine Learning, and Linguistics.
  • Within each lesson, there are three differentiated activities that we as educators will recognize as beginner, intermediate, and advanced; however, when presented to the students, they will be asked to complete the one they are most interested and most comfortable performing. That way, the students can pick which of these, Illini/Blue/Orange, fits their needs and feel successful in their own way. They are encouraged and welcomed to complete more than one of the activities if they have extra time.
  • I chose to have the three activities because I know that differentiation is critical to engage and support students at all levels.
  • With beginner programmers in mind, the coding required is well-structured for them, and the topics are varied to cover NLP, linguistics, and machine learning, and introductory data structures such as dictionaries.
  • In addition, the top of each Google colab Daily Dojo workbook has an uplifting image or quote to encourage a sense of belonging in computer science.

CS + X

This week I was introduced to the CS + X team and curriculum. The current plan is to run two courses: one for students from a local high school who have taken computer science, and the other is called Upward Bound, which identifies first-generation college students and introduces them to computer science and its impact in other fields. I’ll be designing lesson plans and activities as well as teaching and collaborating with the students for these six sessions. The “X” part of the class this summer will be linguistics, so the students will be interacting with natural language processing, machine learning, and English language. The class will culminate in a Python project that examines student written grammar with terminal cases and defined functions.