What have you been learning so far? Give a brief summary.
The first major thing I have been learning about the most effective ways to communicate information online, in order to prepare for my actual video curriculum, this will eventually allow me to be the most engaging possible for my audience. I have also been doing outreach to other teams to meet with their mentors and figure out what is the most important content to teach kids. On top of that I have gathered information on what big improvements I need to make to my video format itself to make it more engaging by creating a demo video and sharing it with other teams.
- What has stirred your emotions? Anything delightful, intriguing, frustrating, shocking?
It has been very interesting and slightly frustrating to learn about how other teams operate. For us, mentors play a back end role just giving us the support we need to succeed. For a lot of other teams though, the mentors play huge roles in the actual creation of the robot, leading to the students learning significantly less and participating significantly less.
- What new questions do you have about this topic?
How do I make my videos engaging?
This question stems from feedback on my recent demo video that has shed light on the necessary improvements to production quality and entertainment value in order to retain viewers.
- What are you learning about your learning process?
I have always been internally motivated to learn. This has made me resort, a lot of times, to the internet or my own research of some kind to answer any questions I have. Through meeting with these other teams, however, I have gained a lot of confidence in my ability to learn from others since these other team mentors have been such different and interesting perspectives to learn from.
- What has been the most helpful thing that has come from meetings with your content advisor?
The most helpful thing that has come with meeting with my content advisor was a structure to this early research phase.
- What do you need to change?
For the most part, I would like to spend more time on my study. With college applications going on I have had to spend less time than ideal on this project. I think that this will naturally fix itself once time opens up since I have a huge interest in this field, but I will need to ensure that happens.