Project Proposal
DCC Capstone Proposal
Alexis M. Anthony
Introduction:
The DCC Mentorship Program is a part of the University of Maryland’s Pre-College Program, the umbrella organization of two of the university’s college preparatory programs: the Upward Bound Program and the Upward Bound Math and Science Program. The mission of the program as stated on their website Precollege.umd.edu is “to provide academic and counseling assistance to capable, high school students with the purpose of preparing them to pursue post-secondary education.” It also “serves as a supplement to its participant’s secondary school experiences. It provides an opportunity for the student to improve his/her self-esteem and to grow academically and socially.”
The DCC branch of this program was developed to expand this mission. Digital Cultures and Creativity was the first honors program to become involved with the Pre-College Program with the hope of extending the technology-based lessons of the DCC first-year students to challenge and engage the high school students. A group of six student mentors was selected by the directors of DCC. The mentors met with the high school students once a month for 5 months and created simplified workshops to teach material from the DCC curriculum.
The general itinerary for sessions with the students looked like this:
- Casual greetings, mingling, and lunch
- Powerpoint to explain material
- Group activity (Workshop)
- Hands on activity using lesson taught in the Powerpoint
- Usually resulting in some sort of competition
- Social time
- Movie, games, etc. related to the lesson
- End of session
It was necessary that the mentors dedicated sufficient time to plan each workshop. The mentors had meetings regularly to design lesson plans as well as organize social activity with the students—lunch was always served during the workshops as well. During the planning sessions, mentors had to take a few basic ideas from the copious amounts of information they were taught by DCC instructors (i.e., coding, algorithms, social networking, robots, prototyping, etc.) and create activities based around those ideas.
First, Powerpoint presentations were created to explain the lesson. For the algorithm lesson, for example, the mentors explained what algorithms are, the key elements of algorithms, how to write them, and how they are used in computers; then they explained how they are used in everyday life. The next part of the lesson is the hands-on activity. For the algorithm assignment, the students were to get into groups and create card games, writing out the directions using the algorithm format. Then they each had a chance to play each other’s games using the algorithms. In the end, they voted on which game was the most easy to understand and the most fun to play. The element of competition made the workshop more exciting. For the social time following, mentees could either watch the movie “21” (which is about card-playing), or play a large group round of the card game “Spoons.”
Each session over the few months was conducted similarly. The goal was to get the high school students engaged in digital cultures in a fun and entertaining way as well as maintain the Pre-College Program’s objective of preparing them to pursue post-secondary education.
Thesis: I am working on building a website to outsource the hands-on, workshop-style teaching methods of the DCC Mentorship Program because I want to find out a way for the methods to be adopted and adapted for use in other secondary and higher educational institutions, in order to help other those educational programs get students actively engaged in their lessons.
Project:
I will document everything the current mentors do and create a manual for how to take college-level material from any discipline and teach it to high school, and most likely higher education students through hands-on workshops and activities.
Format: I will create a website using WordPress.
There will be tabs explaining the current program (Titles subject to change):
There will be an introductory page with a statement about the program and its mission statement. Then there will be main tabs for Year One, Year Two, and About. Each tab will be broken down into subtabs:
- “Year One” will be broken down into these subtabs and the viewer will be instructed view in this order. There will be links at the bottom of each page to the next page. The pages are:
-The Beginning: this tab will have any files I can retrieve from Jarah Moesch, the director of the DCC Mentorship Program, that explain the beginning and planning stages of incorporating DCC into the Pre-College Program.
-The Original Mentors: this tab will have embedded the introductory video from the first-year mentors as well as blurbs describing each of them. They are the main characters/players.
-The Workshops: the first year workshops we not all documented. I will take whatever photos and videos I can gather that Jarah or the other mentors may have taken and embed them in an organized manner. There will also be a hyperlink to a page with all of the PowerPoint presentations the mentors used.
- “Year Two” will be organized a little differently, but still have links from one page to the next.
-Planning for the Second Year: similar to the first year it will have the planning documents and materials that went into pushing the program into the next year.
-The Original Mentors, Round Two: this will have their new introductory video embedded and their updated blurbs.
-The New Mentors: Six more mentors were added this year and run separate workshops with half of the students in a different room but during the same time. This page will be for their video and blurbs.
-Opening Reception: I took several photos from this year’s opening reception and it was covered by a diamondback reporter. I will embed the photos with brief captions and will add a link to the online article.
-November 11 Workshop: Google Earth and the Meaning of Maps: This was the topic of the first workshop. I’ll create a link to the powerpoint that was used. I also took many pictures and will embed those. Along with that, I made an audio-photo slideshow about this workshop and interviewed one mentor and one student. I will make a link for that. Finally, we kept the finished products of the students; therefore I will photograph those and make a gallery.
-December 1 Workshop: Photoshop and Meme Making: this workshop has yet to take place but I will try to shoot some video for it, in order to mix up the kind of media being used. The students will also be working with files on the computer, so I will try to get volunteers who will let me display their finished products on this site.
-Planning for the future: this tab will have information for our future plans and the workshops in the spring. By Dec. 14, the mentors should have planned a field trip for the spring and I will try to upload the documents that were necessary for the mentors to fill out to plan this.
- “About” section will have two subtabs. One with a list of directors and their information. The other will have links to other sites such as the Upward Bound and Pre-College Program sites, and the DCC main page.
Then there will be tabs for the manual/digital toolbox (Titles subject to change):
- What Makes a Good Mentor: This section will discuss the character traits most important for a mentor to possess.
- Introduction Videos: This will have our introduction videos and explain what information is important to include in them.
- How to Structure Meetings: This will explain the chronological organization of activities within the given timeframe of the session.
- How to Simplify College-Level Information: This will explain and give examples of how to take lessons from college classrooms and make them high school friendly.
- How to Create Hands-On, Interactive Activities: This will be a how-to guide for turning information into interactive learning.
- Planning, Planning, and More Planning: How to organize meetings, how to create icebreakers, how to plan out food, etc.
Skills/Tools Needed:
I will need a basic understanding of WordPress. I will also need to know how to embed video, pictures, and information. Organization of information is the most important part in creating a website. I will have to have good organizational skills and knowledge of website aesthetics. I will have to be able to put the website together user-friendly way. The most important part of this project is to be able to outsource the information—in order to do that, I will have to make sure the information is clear, concise, understandable, and engaging. I will also need strong writing skills to put together the information in a way that has good flow.
The only skill listed here that I will need to acquire is more knowledge of WordPress. I have used the site before but never to create an entirely new website. I will have to explore the site and become better acquainted with the interface. The knowledge I have gained from the DCC courses I have already taken will help me to develop my skillset in this area.
With all of these elements together, I hope the outsourcing and expansion the DCC Mentorship Program will be successful.