We have just completed our last week of camp! This week we covered advocacy and the campers made websites for a cause that they were passionate about. Scout and I presented on the first day. We taught the campers about what it means to be an advocate, coding in HTML and branding. For the most part, the presentation went smoothly. It was definitely a challenge presenting the content, interacting with the campers, and checking the chat all at once. I felt like a seal trying to clap and balance a ball on its nose at the same time, but having a partner really helped. We did have a complication with our timing. Since we had three breakout room activities, we knew we would be tight on time, so we scheduled out every section of our presentation. We were actually ahead of schedule during the first half, but at the end, we had to skip a breakout room and two out of our four reflection questions to finish on time. To this day, Scout and I still can’t figure out where we got off schedule, but it all worked out.
The next day, Laila and Mary covered CSS coding and the campers were equipped with the skills to create their own websites for a cause. They used the templates on w3schools to aid them in designing their own sites.
They chose their topics, how they wanted to advocate for their cause, and prepared for their presentation at the end of the week. Most of the campers chose to work alone, some chose groupmates, and some were randomly put into groups. From the breakout room workshop times, I observed that the groups who were randomly put together really didn’t work as well. They had a hard time communicating as a team. This is almost an unavoidable consequence of zoom learning. If the group doesn’t have the right chemistry, it won’t work out. Despite this, I was still impressed with all of the presentations at the end of the week. Some of the presentations from these middle school-aged campers were more impressive than ones I’ve seen in high school and college. These campers were great speakers and are skilled at making beautiful slides. One thing I wish I had seen more of was their websites. We saw a couple of websites in development, but most presentations used slides to explain their campaign. Still, they were really thoughtful about their branding choices and you could tell they put a great amount of research and effort into their projects. By the end of camp, I was blown away by the Eurekans.