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[loyolastars]

Democrats: alright we finally did it, Trumps been impeached. Time for a trial in the-

Republicans: lol yeah about that trial. It’s not gonna be fair or anything, we’ve already made up our minds and there’s gonna be like, 0 witnesses

Democrats: oh? Ok then. If that’s the case then I guess we’ll just hold on to these *pockets articles of impeachment*

Republicans:

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King College Prep

12/22/17

Today was the last day of the semester for the class, and sadly none of them felt like working. Mr. Evins decided to try installing the new PCs today. This involved unplugging the towers from the monitors any switching out newer towers. This took longer than anticipated and the students were minimally cooperative. After that was finished, we only had 20 minutes so the students got to do whatever they wanted.

This year was a great experience and I loved helping the students.

Joey McCauley

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King College Prep

12/21/17

Today the class learned about HTML5 and bootstrap. the students were very happy to hear there was a faster way to code with bootstrap, but wished we had told them about it earlier. Tomorrow is the last day of the semester, so the students will have one final coding challenge.

Joey McCauley

[loyolastars]

Student Teaching at Senn High School

Neha Patel

10.25.17~~~2.5 hours

//Today, I switched between two classes, an introduction to Java Programming class and a Computational Design class. With only 10 kids in the Java class, it was easier to get to know the students faster and all the students appeared to be on the IB track in school. The students were working on a basic question and answer program, for which I assisted them as they came across errors. The Computational Design course is actually a remedial course for students to encourage them to stay in school. These students are a bit behind compared to other classes and definitely needed a little bit extra help. They all had a worksheet to complete which I assisted them on, and we also took guided notes. The difference between the two classes was massive. I look forward to seeing what I learn from each of the different classes. 

10.31.17-11.1.17~~~3 hours

//Today, I took guided notes with the computational design class. It was difficult to keep their attention on me at all times, and I had to go very slow so that no one would get left behind. The basic functions of the robots were taught to them. They learned the importance of power of each wheel, number of rotations given to each wheel, and the speed. The students were also not in the mood to do anything today, so I received a lot of sass and it was hard to keep them on track especially because they could not sit still. At the end of class, they had a chance to just look at the robots and program. 

11.6.17~~~2 hours

//My computational design students had their first day working with the EV3 program. There were many computer issues that I had not taken into account and it really took up more time than expected. Even once the students all had access to the EV3 program, they all were constantly having problems to which some didn't have resolutions. Everything today was a learning process. 

11.7.17-11.8.17~~~3 hours

//My Java students were exposed to loops for the first time today. They were almost as confused as I was when I was first introduced to loops. I felt that I could really help the students and understand their questions more than the actual teacher could because I was in their shoes a year ago. It was easy for me to spot errors and teach them the an easier approach. The students completed a short quick assignment that dealt with loops and had a basic/solid understanding of the concept by the end of class. I have noticed there is only one female student in my Intro to Java course. Stereotype threats apply in this situation because she doesn’t speak up in class due to the fear of being incorrect and appear less intelligent compared to the other guys.

11.13.17~~~2 hours

//My students were required to complete their code today in order to be on track for the rest of the class. Many students were not even half way done with the code which was shocking considering we spent so much time on it. It was frustrating because the program they were coding on is not available to them at home, so they had to finish it during the class period. Many students rushed through the code and did not do that great of a job, and a lot of students just copied the smart kids in class. I was frustrated because the teacher was okay with them copying each other and not gaining any actual knowledge. I noticed one specific student, Alan, is one of the brightest students in the class, except whenever asked to perform tasks or complete assignment, he slacks off and acts dumb. I’m assuming he believes it makes him look cool as the other students laugh and applaud at his stupidity, but while working with him one on one, I discovered not only does he pay attention in class, but he also fully comprehends the material. Overall, today was full of chaos and I am just glad its over and their code is completed.

11.14.17~~~2 hours

//Today, the students were going to be assessed on how well their program allowed their robots to work. Many flaws in programming came out, and it was quite chaotic considering they students were very frustrated and just wanted to give up. I am very proud to say that by the end of the day, every student had a robot that was functioning at the standard it should have been. The frustration I saw in the students and how happy they were after they overcame it was a valuable lesson I hope to have taught the kids. They should never give up (especially not drop out of school). The students appear to be enjoying STEM more than they did before, so I was very excited that the purpose of my presence in the class is being fulfilled. 

11.15.17~~~1. hours

//Today, I lead an after school club called The Makers Club. The purpose of this club is to gather students and make cool projects using STEM ideals. Each student was placed in a group, and I walked around from group to group trying to figure out what they planned/ desired to build throughout the semester. My favorite group idea was the thought of building a potato cannon. Due to the potato cannon being a more long-term project, that group worked on figuring out the materials they would need and coming up with a game plan. I assisted another group with starting to make a virtually unlimited paper fortune teller. 

11.20.17~~~2 hours

//Today was the final day of the robotics unit in my Computational Design course. The students were testing out how well their program and robots completed a test course. The students were all more than thrilled to be done with the robotics unit and kept getting frustrated when the robot did not make it through the entire course. I was in charge of grading the students on how well their robot made it through the set track. The students have never been more excited about anything else in the class. It was a great way to end my volunteering with them. 

Overall Experience

//Over the semester, I have been assisting students at Nicholas Senn High School. These students are among the remedial children that are placed in computer science and programming courses as a way to spark their interested in staying in school. Students in these courses have difficult situations at home, diagnosed disabilities, and lack the desire to earn a degree. Working with these students has allowed me to connect to the University’s mission.  After talking to many students, not only have they started to grow on me, but they also have started to open up about their unique situations. My service experiences have proved to me that even the happiest people can be wearing a fake mask. Children should be encouraged to join the science, technology, engineering, and mathematical fields starting at a young age in order to really engage them, but there should be more of a focus on inspiring minorities to join.  A start to solving these issues would not only boost the confidence of students, but would create unity. I have connected to the University’s mission by not only academically assisting the students, but also to guiding them along the right path and encouraging them to stay in school. 

[loyolastars]

CMSA - FTC Robotics

10-28-2017 ~ 10:00-14:00

Today was the weekend before the big event. New desks were ordered, so ahead of time, I was able to help rewire the tangled mess. Upon the students arising, one key issue was faced between the modems of the controller and the robot...they could not connect! So we had to form a solution and fast. Hence, upon delving into the research regarding Android devices, I was able to assist in annexing the code necessary to successfully connect the modems. It was a last-minute victory in a sense, as no connectivity merely leads to the robot just sitting on the playing field and not doing anything. Now, onto making sure that the grip actually can pick up the foam blocks successfully!

-Nathaniel Polley

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King College Prep

11/14/17

Today we continued learning about CSS layout and finished learning about IDs. Mr. Evins and I continue to have to hammer in the basics of HTML. Simple things like closing tags or spelling errors are still commonplace. I was hoping these things wouldn't be an issue this late in the semester, but I understand how learning a language can be difficult. Next week we will be teaching the class bootstrap, which should hopefully be easy for the students to pick up

Joey McCauley

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Family Matters

12/12/2017

Today Stacy and I worked on how to round numbers to the nearest 10 and 100. We also worked on some of her reading skills. She has improved quite a bit since the beginning of the semester on her pronunciation and her ability to read faster. Axel and I worked on his science homework on the water cycle and the oxygen-CO2 cycle. He mainly was worried about his constitution test the following day so I helped him study by giving him the definitions and he would tell me what or who I was describing. This was my last day tutoring both of them this semester. We have a holiday party next week so this was the last one-on-one. I am happy to say that I will be back next semester as well to tutor them both and I am happy of the connection I have with both of them. 

-Komal S. 

[loyolastars]

Family Matters

12/05/17

Stacy was having a rough day today and did not have any homework to work on so we mainly just worked on her cursive writing and her drawing/painting skills. She wanted it to be an easy session and I did not want to push her too much.

Axel had homework in Math with similar and congruent triangles. I ask him how he is being taught in class but he does not really tell me any specifics about his lessons in class so I am left to improvise. I work with him to teach him how I go through each problem to get to the answer.

-Komal S.

[loyolastars]

Family Matters

11/14/17

Stacy and I are still working on her multiplication skills. It seems as the only time she really practices is during our tutoring sessions and whenever they go over it in class. She does not seem to be retaining the information and her home life does not consist of much homework or readings being done. After finding this out, I will make it a point to come up with easy and fun ways to help her retain the information as much as I can.

Axel had science homework today. It had to do with the biosphere and the different biomes. He mostly had to memorize the definitions of certain vocabulary words so we worked together to make flashcards and quiz each other.

-Komal S. 

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Family Matters

11/7/17

Stacy and I have been working on her multiplication. She gets distracted very easily and is unfocused on her school work. She loves listening to music videos so I made it a point to reward her after a certain amount of correct answers to our exercises. She also wants to work on her cursive and science skills and I hope to help her through that in the upcoming weeks.

Axel is also struggling with math, but in his case it is with integers. I am trying to work with him to make it easier for him to remember what to do with multiplication, addition, subtraction and division and shortcuts with each. 

-Komal S. 

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West Ridge

I had two sessions at West Ridge Last Week:

On Monday:

We tried to advance our games a little bit further but unfortunately the computers we were given were old and slow, so not a lot got done with the games themselves. We did talk more about methods and if statements a little bit more however, which seemed useful.

On Friday:

This was my last session with CodePhreaks. I really enjoyed the program and at this session, we went a little away from the games and talked about careers in computing. I think it was important to talk about what they can do with programming in order to stay interested in it. 

Zac Gallagher 

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UNO Charter School/Google IgniteCS

Friday 12/8/17

Today was the last day of our program for the semester. Students presented their final projects with the whole class. Games like race car, flappy bird, and mazes were very impressive. During their presentations, they also talked about how the games were designed to be played and the code they used to make certain functions.

For next semester, we are planning to run two separate courses, one is an advanced programming class (maybe Python) for the current students on Tuesdays, and another intro class same as this (using Scratch) for new students on Fridays.

Emily D. He

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King College prep

12/8/17

Today's lesson continued from yesterday's. They finished practicing nav bars. We moved on to the next lesson. The class was shown how to use IDs in HTML

Joey McCauley

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Senn High-School

11/14

Today i attended 7th period again. I was again asked to sit in the back of the class and answer questions that came up. The students were reviewing what arrays are, and had a problem where they had to create a new array and initialize it with a list. This took up the entire class period, but in the end there wasn’t much of a struggle from any student. I answered a few questions, but for the most part the students today seem to get what was going on.

11/21

Today i got to teach in front of the class in 7th period. The students are beginning to learn about algorithms, i was to come in and talk about sorting. I was able to stand in front of the class and have them reason through a bubblesort on an array. It was clear that the students had some trouble with the concepts, so we started by asking them to just help me write the pseudocode for it on the board. I did have to give away some of the information, such as the need for an outer while loop and a boolean flag, but other than that the students seemed to have a pretty good idea of what was going on. The next step is after thanksgiving i will come in to help them the actual java code and get it working.

11/28

Today was the first day back since the last lesson for the students, so we resumed with the bubblesort problem. I spent the entire class period walking around from computer to computer answering any questions that the students had. It was actually shocking to me to see how much they seem to have forgotten from previous lessons. For example 4 students out of about 15 came to with code that was comparing index values, without actually using those values to access the array. Example:

if(i > i + 1) instead of if(arr[i] > arr[i + 1]. The assignment was to have a fully working bubblesort implemented by the end of the period, however, none of the students were able to do so. We will spend some time next class period finishing this up tomorrow.

12/4’

Today i attended 7th period IB computer science again as i have been for the past few months. Moving on from bubblesort, today we begain working on selection sort. Again today i was able to teach in front of the class by myself, where i asked questions to the students, and tried to push them toward giving me the pseudocode for a selection sort.  After giving them hints, they were able to guide me towards the correct answer. I then wrote the pseudocode on the board, and asked the students to write a java program that will implement it. By the end of the period no one was able to finish their program, so they will have to pick this up again tomorrow but it went well overall.

12/5

Today i had my first real chicago public school experience. Before today i was only teaching in IB computer science class, as well as running a voluntary after school programming club. Today however, i decided to come in and teach for the entire day, from 2nd to 8th period. This meant that i had to interact with students who had a completely different outlook on school than what i had gotten used to with my high level students. The classes i taught were 2nd, 3rd, and 8th period “intro to games programming” and 4th, and 7th period was IB computer science. 5th and 6th was my lunch break. For the games programming class in all periods we had the students work on coding a “choose your own adventure” game. The assignment was to use if/else if and else statements in python to ask the user questions, and then give them a different ending in a text game based on those answers. During these classes i saw what teachers deal with on a day to day bases. Two students in the class spent the entire class period talking, loudly, to each other and even threats of them having to leave the room had zero effect. These students never turned on their computer to even attempt the assignment and just took the zero. One student slept for the entire period, also taking an zero. For the most part there were 3-5 students per class who were taking this seriously, and then the majority of the others kind of tried, but also slacked off, and then there were a few trouble makers. I’m not sure what lead to this class being so challenging, as my experience in high school was much better than this. But i suspect that having a computer in front of the high schools leads them to get more distracted. I’ll be coming back for a full day tomorrow so i'll hope tomorrow goes better.

12/6

Today i did another full day at Senn High-school. It was much the same as  yesterday, but today i was able to focus more on one on one time with the students who were trying, but struggling. I sat down with one student in particular for 3rd and 8th period who was having problems with understanding the assignment. The one on one time helped me work on my teaching skills, and it also forced me to learn patience as i had to explain the same thing for about an hour, before we made any progress on the task. Along with this i was also able to get some time teaching in front of the class in a computer science class with the more high level students. There was even a time in which an instructor was stumped as to why the students need to use “break” after a case in a switch statement and i was able to teach the entire class about breakthrough, its uses (if there are any to be honest) and why it’s important to understand every line in a piece of code, and to not just copy and paste examples you see. This was my last day of my 25 hours for this class, but i plan to keep attending Senn High-School on some days to continue working with the students there.   

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Uno Charter School

Today was the last day of the after school program. The kids applied their newfound knowledge of Scratch to create their own games. Over the last few weeks they’ve been working on these final projects and today they were presented. A number of students really put the time and effort to make a fantastic game, and it showed. After presenting, the students demoed each other’s games to test them out. The scratch software could be a little bit buggy, but overall the projects looked amazing and the students walked away with something they could be really proud of.

Natasha Lenart

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Family Matters

11/29

Today was my first day tutoring Norma, she is a Freshman at Mather high school. We went over her biology homework and took notes on a chapter on limiting factors in ecosystems. After we finished her biology homework, we went onto math where she had to solve for two variables in a given equation. She picked up on how to do this fast and eventually completed her homework in no time.

11/30

I tutored Brenda today and we went over her algebra homework where she had to convert binomials into a standard line equation. She seemed very confused at first, but as we progressed she seemed more and more confident in what she was doing. It was good to know that I was able to help her understand something that she had no idea how to do. 

12/6

Today I tutored Norma once again, all she had for homework was to read  a chapter on biodiversity and endangered wildlife. It was good to learn that she had no idea that wildlife was so important to the Earth. We had a deep conversation about how humans impact the Earth and what the consequences have been. We eventually finished reading the chapter and she had a deeper understanding of knowing how to be aware of what humans do and how some of our current practices are damaging the land we live on.

12/7

Just like most Thursdays, I tutored Brenda once again. She forgot her homework at home, but remembered that she had a history exam on Tuesday. As a result we spent the majority of our time taking notes on World War 1. She had a study guide from her teacher and we slowly but surely made our way down the list answering all the study guide questions. I hope that she was able to get a good understanding of the material for her test on Tuesday.

-Jimmy Guan