Meeting Charleston

CS First Volunteer Rally:

For this 462 class, each student has to go out and attend a meeting outside the college that pertains to the computer science world. For my write up I was going to talk about the CS First volunteer rally that I attended.

CS First is a 2-year pilot focused on increasing student access and exposure to Computer Science (CS) Education through after school and summer programs. The goal is to build the CS Education capacity of regional South Carolina K-12 schools. These after school programs are developed and run by Google CS Teaching Fellows in conjunction with volunteers like you. -CSfirst.net

The volunteer rally demonstrated to any interested attendees what the CS First program was about. It also went over what each of us would due if we decided to apply to become a volunteer guru and help lead one of the their after-school programs.

The rally was held at Cane Bay High School on March, 27th. Beforehand, all prospective attendees had to register for the rally, so once we got their they already had name-tags printed and lamented for us to wear, as well as a bag full of useful supplies (i.e. notebook, folder, post-it notes, etc.). Everyone met up in the auditorium of the school and was treated to catering by Caviar and Bananas. Once a lot of people had settled at tables, the Google representatives went through a presentation explaining the after-school program and some figures/numbers pertaining to past sessions and their success. After this, everyone split off into 4 groups based on the color of the name-tag they received, with each group going into there own computer labs at the school. In the computer labs a Google employee went through the steps of a usual lesson with us volunteers acting as the children. This was helpful not only to understand what the after-school program was about, but also to get some perspective of how the kids will feel when we are teaching them. At the end of the psuedo-lesson everyone was required to fill out a survey of how they felt about the volunteer rally and any comments they had about the process.

All in all the experience was really interesting. I made to sure to immediately apply for a volunteer position for an after-school program near me. Hopefully I will get to be involved with this very forward-thinking program that brings Computer Science to middle schoolers.