Our team of organizers spent more than 20 hours meeting via Zoom and also working off of Zoom to plan for our STEM classes. We needed to decide on the different classes we were going to teach, how we were going to communicate with parents, our target audience, where and when we would start promotion and the classes itself, where to teach the classes (what platform?), creating a website, and much more. We wanted to bring a flawless set of classes to our students and encourage them to enjoy and find an interest in STEM, and we worked hard in doing so.
We used a variety of different promotion techniques for our STEM classes ranging from WeChat, WhatsApp, and Facebook. We arranged our promotion techniques to correlate to the specific audience for each class. Another area of focus was to create different flyers for the classes and post them in respective chats with an interest form, so that we would be able to better understand and correspond to the needs of our community.
The feedback and responses we received were immense, with our first round of advertisements receiving an alarming 52 responses. We were surprised and ecstatic to see so many students interested in STEM.
The great turnout of the spring session also inspired us to create our fall session with two new classes. In the future, we hope to continue bringing this service to our community with new and interesting curriculum on STEM related subjects.
Our first session of classes began on May 28, 2020 and successfully concluded mid-June. The fall session began on September 17, 2020 and continued until the week before Thanksgiving break.
Classes were greatly enjoyable, for both IRHS students, who were the teachers, and the younger children.
Our celebration:
Because we were under shelter in place restrictions, we were unable to hold a celebration for the end of our first session of classes in person. However, we held a Zoom party with all the different classes together and played games and had fun.
Everyone had fun getting to know each other and playing Never Have I Ever. We also had students share what they liked the most about our classes and what they learned. It a wonderful experience for both our teachers and students, and everyone took away lots from this amazing experience.
Each class also enjoyed their own individual celebrations in their own unique ways. For example, in Introduction to Programming I taught by Janie Kuang, they celebrated by playing a game of Jeopardy, which had a mix of questions ranging from topics we learned in class and random questions for fun.
In Asilah Maryam's Introduction to Programming I class, they celebrated the end of their session by solving a special riddle, a happy little tradition for team building in the Introduction to Programming II (ITP2) class.
In order to assess the impact of our classes, we sent a feedback form to all of our students after the session ended, and hoped to use their input to better develop future classes.
The positive feedback inspired us to open a second session of STEM classes for our students, and it gave us the motivation to make this community service event a long-term commitment. We added classes to our curriculum, and recruited new teachers to join us and provide this service to more young girls and boys in our community.
Loopmail from Mrs. Wheaton, our chapter advisor, of our successful completion of our service.
Back to our concept:
The next step in our journey: