My experience was to complete a significant semester long service through the Shriver learning center’s Prac 096. I volunteered at Arbutus Middle School through creative coders. This experience allowed me to help advance middle school students programming competency and provide a valuable mentorship. This is related to my challenge because it allowed me to help incubate better programmers that will be more than ready to tackle advances in health informatics from a software engineering perspective. My involvement started in Fall 2019 and ended at the end of that semester. The average semester is 15 weeks, and I volunteered 4 hours in total each week. This gave me 60 hours of volunteer work with 2 hours of reflection sessions.

 

Although it is not directly related to health informatics, this can indirectly be tied to it due to the valuable skills I helped teach my mentee. Some examples of these skills included logic-based reasoning, programming competency, critical reasoning, etc. These skills can be applied to the advancement of health informatics because most of the heavy use of programming, and logic in the field. In my experience I got to show my mentee how to construct blocks of code in a meaningful way. I also got to teach them about various different programming platforms, mainly scratch and unreal engine. I got to see my mentee make lots of progress and begin to reason through complex problems on their own. 

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This experience contributed towards many of the GCSP learning objectives. These learning objectives included integrity, perspectivism, realistic vision, teamwork, persistence, and flexibility. For integrity, in creative coders we tried to uphold many core beliefs and values. The creative coders believe that for someone to learn they must have a growth mindset that can be improved with the help of mentorship. If a student is not doing well then it is our job as their mentors to figure out the source of the problem and help them solve it. For perspectivism, creative coders took place at Arbutus Middle School. AMS is a school that has a lack of resources  and gets a wide variety of students from all different backgrounds. It was important that the mentors used perspectivism to consider all situations other than their own. That was a crucial piece of the mentorship. For realistic vision, our mentees had to design a game using Scratch. We had to help them come up with a realistic vision for them to work on during the semester. We helped come up with alternatives for nonrealistic ideas.
For teamwork, when someone joins creative coders, they join a team of mentors focused on bettering middle school students. It would have been a disservice to us and our mentees if we didn’t evaluate our strengths and weaknesses as a team as the semester went on. We had many teams discusses where we talked about what was going well and what we could do better. For persistence, it is important to keep an open mind when dealing with middle schoolers. Not everything is going to work out on the first try, and they might not always agree with you. It was our job as mentors to show persistence in learning from mistakes and jumping on opportunities. Finally for flexibility, as a mentor, it was crucial to exhibit flexibility when dealing with your mentee. If a mentee didn’t like what they were doing then the mentors needed to help find something that the mentees would enjoy. This meant sometimes we had to take a project in a completely opposite direction while still upholding the beliefs of the program.

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Overall, I feel like I have taken a lot away from this experience. I got to learn valuable mentorship skills, and give back to my community. I was able to make a difference by giving my mentee inspiration, and hopefully sparking his hunger for knowledge. I was able to demonstrate commitment to the students. This was important to community engagement because it's all about leading by example. We were able to show the mentees how valuable giving back to the community can be, and they will hopefully pay it forward in their respective futures. The program as a whole had a wide spread positive impact. This is because it allowed motivated students who were interested in computer science pursue the tools for becoming more knowledgeable. These are opportunities that those students might not have had without the creative coders. The skills that the students learned from the mentors could stick with them for life, and that is what was truly powerful about this experience to me.

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