Community Project Final Reflection

For my community project, I thought of engaging people in a way, that they find interesting
and hopefully would like to delve deeper into. The reason that I wanted to keep this as my
main goal is because, currently, we are in a midst of a global pandemic, and this has slowed
the mobility of people, and also has caused stress among many people. To help people, take
their mind off the current situation, I wanted to teach something that they hopefully find
interesting, and wish to learn more about. When I reflected upon ideas to engage people, I
came across one of my favourite quotes by Steve Jobs which stated “Everyone should learn
how to program because it teaches you how to think.” This quote had inspired me to learn
programming, since it talks about helping people to think creatively for different situations. This
made me think if I could teach kids the basics of coding.

With this idea, I went on and started planning and researching what I should teach. As a result,
I came up with an idea to make a Scratch jr course for kids aged 6 to 8 years old. Later on in
the process, I also came up with the idea to make videos about Scratch and upload it to
Youtube. I thought I should make the videos also since it would help kids that are older to learn
Scratch. The process of making the video script and the lesson script were quite time
consuming since they had to be in detail. This lead to me being quite stressed because I had
to be able to manage my time between class work and the community project, so I made a
strategy for me to finish up both the class projects and the scripts for the community project.
The strategy was to focus on one project per hour (say the class work) and focus on the other
after the hour has ended.

That strategy helped me to finish the scripts or the necessary things needed for the community
project, but also the classwork that I had. This made it easier for me to manage my time
properly. In this project, I had not collaborated with anyone. I think that if I collaborated with
someone then, the work would be easier since it would be split. But since I am the only one
working on this project, I had no other choice but do everything myself. The reason I chose to
work alone on this project is because the topic/general idea is inspired by coding. Coding is
something that not many people in my class are interested in, hence I chose to work on this
project by myself. However, if I had chosen to work on this project with someone else, I think
the workload could have been lower, but I feel that this was a challenge and I am happy to
have achieved it.
This project was both challenging and enjoyable. I am a person that always appreciates
challenges and am looking forward to facing them since I really enjoy solving them. The
challenge in this project was time-management, and also to be honest with myself, lack of
experience in teaching. The reason I felt like lack of experience in teaching was because I did
not know how to teach the kids in the courses properly, hence I reflected on the online learning
classes we have had, and tried to replicate the methodology through my course. At first, I was
really confused about how to do the technique, but I thought about the key point that teachers
say in the class period. The teachers always say what we are going to do, how we are going to
do it and finally they actually show us the thing we are going to do, so we can use something
to reference to. This was the method, I used to teach the students in the course, I told them
what we are going to do, how we are going to do it and gave them an example, so they can
reference to it when they are writing their own code. This really helped me with teaching the
students, along with the VAK learning style research I did.

I felt that this project has helped the entire community since we have reduced the amount of
our mobility during the corona pandemic (which has gave us more time to do something
effective). I thought that the community that I was solving the problem for, had less interaction
with the interest to coding. However, when I had released the Youtube videos, the community
that interacted with the videos were much larger than I expected, and hence made a bigger
impact than I expected to make. This helped me understand the impact of coronavirus on the
people at home. The impact that I found was not by research, but rather by the service that I
did (teach scratch).

However, I felt like I would have liked to make more impact on the community than the project I
did. I felt that if I had done a topic that is interesting to everyone (not everyone is interested in
coding) and also advertised the events more globally, then I would have made more impact. I
also would choose to do the project in groups if I were to do it again since it would reduce the
workload for me. However, I am very happy about the success of this project and its outreach.
I am very happy, that the outreach of this project will continue to grow since it is always on
Youtube under the account Boffin Buddy. From this project, I had a very good learning
experience which was to be able to be principled (time-management) and an inquirer
(researching and exploring new knowledge). I feel that from this project, it is very important to
do your best for your community to teach/improve the knowledge of those surrounding you. In
the future, I will continue to do my best for my community, and always remember how teaching
improves your own knowledge.