Following Up is an initiative by a group of Grade 12 students who wish to follow up on the current learning of Grade 5 and Grade 6 students from CENTEX Manila through the creation of supplementary materials. Through this, the group hopes to provide students with a deeper understanding of their lessons and fundamentals, which will help them deal with more advanced topics in the future.

The organizers of Following Up believe that students should have access to additional learning materials and resources that will allow them to further pursue and learn about lessons they are interested in or are struggling with. We advocate for the improvement of the online learning experience of students by providing them with digestible and concise learning materials that will also help them gain a deeper understanding of their lessons.

With the rise of the pandemic in early March 2020, students were forced to stay at home and study from there. With online learning being implemented in schools all around the Philippines, modules replaced classroom activities and physical learning. In addition to this, the government provided their own modules, created by DepEd, to public schools to ensure that students were on top of their lessons and topics. However, these modules and assessments are either confusing or not enough at times (DBM, 2020). 

CENTEX Manila is one such school that received modules from the government. However, these modules may be seen as the baseline. The modules contained topics that focused only on the lesson and did not necessarily encourage further research or learning. CENTEX Manila could make great use of supplementary materials that add a little extra learning to its topics and spark their students' interest in further topics. 

Most of the students in CENTEX elementary schools come from impoverished backgrounds and have a strong desire to learn. Following Up hopes to harness this desire and further excite them about their education, which is the key to the betterment of their lives. This was done through the following steps:

Writing the modules was much more complex and time-consuming than expected. It was difficult to determine the right depth of content for the modules fitting for Grade 5-6 students so as to properly supplement the school modules that they already have, while still being accurate to their curriculum. These were also hard to generally plan out on top of the workload from other schoolwork being present.

The perceived short-term and long-term benefits of the community project are shown in the objectives section above. In the short-term, this project has hopefully assisted students in reviewing current lessons, helped them gain a deeper understanding of the topics, and encouraged them to pursue further study on the topics to further their interests in Science and Physics. As for the long-term benefits, this project hopes to have created supplementary modules that instilled a deeper understanding of fundamental lessons in students that will provide them with the needed understanding to deal with more advanced topics as they pursue higher levels of studies. 

To continue this project and ensure it will have lasting effects and benefits for the community, the group plans to have a meeting with the community gatekeepers after the end of classes to discuss future plans. This will hopefully cement a connection between PSHS and CENTEX to allow future groups in the PSHS to easily continue and follow up on this program. The group also plans to have the modules created be useable by all CENTEX campuses (and not just for use by CENTEX Manila students only).

Through this community project, the group was able to successfully provide the intelligent and low-income students of CENTEX further support in their studies through the creation and distribution of effective modules that supplemented their learnings as well as further sparked their interests and appreciation for Physics and Science. However, the implementation of the community project was not perfect, with the modules having some issues as noted by the students and the group facing several issues throughout the implementation.

Overall, the group was able to address the needs of the community. The students reported that the modules were effective-meaning the group did well, but there is still much to learn and improve on. Though, given the intermittent scheduling, it can be said that it was still a job well done.

For future implementations of projects similar to this, it is recommended that groups plan out the modules and prepare a timeline much earlier in advance based on the DepEd curriculum (which is what most public schools follow), as this will allow future groups to spend more time on the creation of the actual content during the implementation phase rather than outlining. In addition, future groups should attempt to strike for depth in a single central topic instead of focusing on a broad array of topics for the modules. This is due to most schools having their own modules that summarize topics or are focused on a breadth of topics, so supplementary modules that have a more in-depth focus on a certain topic will likely have more value to spark further research in students.  

It is also recommended that future projects add more activities and exercises that will cement the learnings of students on topics. These will likely help them become more invested in the topic. Lastly, it is suggested that future groups catering to young students incorporate more interactive elements into their supplementary materials and have an additional focus on miscellaneous elements such as the addition of designs that would make the modules more fun for the students.