Takeaways from My Experience Moving Computer Science Outreach from the Lab to K-12 Classrooms

This past December, the PLSE lab had some exciting new outreach opportunities where volunteers from our lab visited classrooms for Hour of Code, a nationwide program for promoting computer science education in K-12 schools.

While PLSE has hosted outreach activities during CS Ed Week before, interested students had to come to our lab on the UW campus physically. This can constrain who is able to attend in a way that often falls across socioeconomic strata. Being able to go out to the schools ourselves means we can reach a wider audience, which we found to be a pretty exciting prospect.

Here are three of my takeaways from my experience that I wanted to share in this week’s blog post.

Go with the Flow

After participating in outreach activities for the past three or four years, I thought I had a fairly good handle on how to run outreach activities. I have also had some classroom experience, either as a teacher’s assistant for a middle school gifted and talented program or as the instructor of record over the summer here at UW.

Something I forgot to account for, however, was that when your model of outreach involves parents or guardians bringing students to your outreach program, they most likely will bring students who can sit still and be quiet for 30-40 minutes.

The students we met with this December ranged across the entire spectrum of attention spans. Some of them were quiet, and spent the entire class period engaging in the activities we had to share. Others were talkative and boisterous, sometimes yelling across the room to their friends about the cool dragon curve they were making, or about something completely random. One moment that sticks out to me is when I said the numbers 6 and 7 close to each other, and the student I was talking to suddenly exclaimed to their friend, “Oh my god, they just said 6-7!” and the entire moment was derailed. (From what I’ve gathered, this is some sort of gen alpha meme?)

Throughout, however, it was helpful to keep moving on. There was only so much time in each class period for the activity, and while I’m sure I could have done things better, we were also introducing the students to new concepts that they otherwise might have not known about, and that seems like a net win to me.

Clean Up Time and Other K-12 Rituals

This was something I had forgotten from my K-12 days, but attendance needs to be taken, and students are often responsible for putting the classroom back to rights at the end of the class period. (The latter is especially important if you are going to do an activity involving a lot of pieces of paper and tape, and can be especially helpful to leverage ~20 pairs of hands in parallel instead of having one or two activity leaders clean up.) Time needs to be allotted for both when you’re preparing an activity for deployment in a K-12 classroom.

(And, needless to say, you don’t want to leave a mess for the teacher who graciously allowed you into their classroom for the day!)

Partnership

When I ran outreach activities previously in the PLSE lab, I often had very little idea about who was going to walk in the door, and once the students left, I likely would not see them again.

This couldn’t be less of the case when you are visiting a teacher’s classroom. The teacher will have had months to work with the students and get to know them, and can give you a heads-up when one class might be particularly energetic. And instead of using QR codes to distribute links to our web demo that the students can play with at home, we can ask the teacher to distribute it through the school system’s LMS (learning management software). That way, the students will have access to the links for the rest of the semester.

There were countless other ways the teacher helped us, from teaching us how to use the A/V system (including a microphone, so we did not have to strain our voices to be heard), to pulling up our slides ahead of time, to giving us tips on classroom management.

And in return, we can provide a different perspective on computer science to the teacher’s students, supplementing their curriculum and showing the students that there are many people from all over invested in their future.

Conclusion

And despite that not all of our outreach activities went exactly according to plan, at the end of our visit, the teacher actually invited us back in the spring semester. I was a little surprised by this, especially since I’m sure I seemed a bit (or quite) overwhelmed at times, but I also felt excited that this could be the start of a longer term partnership with teachers in Seattle’s public schools.

Public school teachers are overworked and underappreciated, but I wouldn’t be where I am today with my public school K-12 education. So it feels good to give back to the teachers by giving them a lighter day during the hectic holiday season and at the same time, have students stretch their thinking about what computation and programming mean.

And in fact, we’re already signed up to do more outreach in Seattle’s public schools this quarter. And undoubtedly we will be better prepared, but also completely caught off guard, by each new school visit.