Global Codeathon Wrap-up

The codeathon was great.  Mindy, Heidi, Michelle and Dan did a great job setting it all up and keeping it all working.  As you've certainly read from previous posts, I brought three students and was on the intermediate level backchannel to chat with kids who needed help.

First off, I'll cover the two things that didn't go superbly.  With all of the tasks for the intermediate group posted on the GC (global codeathon) website, all the students went to re-read them as soon as Heidi was finished speaking.  Not just all in Hanoi (about 60-80 users) but also the schools who were listening to the instructions over the Google Hangout.  We DDOS'd the website I think.  With a bit of patience, everything was back on a roll and going fine.  We were all a bit surprised that we would do that, but it is hard to test 100+ requests of your site at once.  So we learned and moved on.

Intermediate and beginner were our two sessions.  This looked great in planning, but we had some kids fall into the 'no a total beginner' but 'not ready to work on my own' category.  Most of these students would have benefited from going to the beginner session and re-learning a lot of what they had been introduced to.  However, no one wanted to crush a kids aspirations and send them to the beginner session after they had considered themselves an intermediate.  This meant that a few students needed a lot of extra help, and I had to re-adjust my approach to helping them.  Once I learned where these students were in Scratch, I got off of the backchannel and helped them face-to-face.

That's it.  A surprise on website traffic and a few students who mis-estimated their abilities.  As far as being an untested event bringing many schools together online, a lot of things should have gone wrong and didn't thanks to the team's planning.  Now some of the other schools did have their own issues with joining our Google Hangout, but to those of us who were not part of the organizing team, we had no idea and didn't think much about it.  We were focused on all the schools who were able to join us.

Backchanneling is what I knew I was going to learn a lot from.  Here are my two biggest take-aways: Backchannelchat.com has a few characters which it does not print.  I did try a few 'escape' characters, combining a backslash with a greater than.  It didn't work.  After firing off a few half-blank messages, I altered how I was typing.  The annoying part is, in Scratch, you use operators that look like this:   so I naturally recreated it like this < (Y >70) > and < (touching sprite 2) >
It was my attempt to explain the graphic.  In fact, everything between <   > , the greater than/less than, was cut out.  I got around this by simply typing more of an explanation.  Typing more was fine since I had very few questions to answer.

I was not able to help those students who were accidentally in the intermediate group through backchannel.  Instead of pointing out a particular block to use (which was the only assistance some students needed) I was dealing with totally new concepts for these students.  I was able to sit down with them (Luckily they were in Hanoi, in the room, rather than another country).  I don't know what Dan Slaughter went through with the beginner backchannel, but it may have been similar.

The last observation was: I was pretty useless.... in a GREAT way!

All of the students in the Hanoi intermediate group helped each other, taught each other and did great work on their own.  So aside from a few questions, they didn't need me.  I love it when students take on learning without me, if I've been a good teacher, I'm no longer needed.  Now I didn't teach all of these kids, but obviously their teachers did a great job, or I would have been helping everyone.