As our first week of the program, this week included some planning, recruitment, and our first team reflection. During the beginning of the week, we were forming the foundations of our own lesson plans to teach during the camp in July. I was stumped for a few days trying to come up with an idea that would be both interesting and educational for younger students. I finally settled on “the behind-the-scenes of video games”, since video games are the favorite pastime of all my younger siblings and cousins now that school is out for summer, and is something that they rarely stop talking about. I was especially happy with this topic when I realized that it was something I would have actually enjoyed learning about when I was younger, even though I had a strong dislike for anything math-related at the time and was never that interested in video games until later on. After forming our lesson plans, we had to do some recruitment for the program. This year, recruitment consisted of sending out some emails, which is undoubtedly less satisfying than in-person recruitment, but is exciting nonetheless. Now that recruitment and the foundations of later lessons are started, I can move on to training next week, keeping in mind my goal for the program to provide solid support to these young students and to show them how fun it can be to learn!
