A Day in the Life of a Teacher Who Codes: Week 3

Hello! I’m Kristi, a teacher for Girls Who Code at Pixar, and I’m back again this week to give you an inside look at our . Here’s the scoop on week 3.

Monday

It’s time for another exciting week, and today I started off with teaching (OOP), a new and difficult concept. We started with extending their bouncing ball projects from last week, creating bouncing balls using OOP. 

After lunch, my students pulled a NEW PRANK on me that I did not see coming at all. In the afternoon, we had a lovely presentation by about the storyboarding and editing process of Pixar movies. For the rest of the day the students worked on a project to create a scene of falling snow.

Tuesday

This morning, I gave my students a little more time to finish their falling snow project before we moved onto the next one: the City Scroller project. To make sure everyone had an equal time on the computer, we made the groups switch who was using the computer every ten minutes. The City Scroller project is a hard one, so the students continued to work on it the rest of the day. 

They did not pull a prank on me today, which just made me more suspicious of them…

Wednesday

This morning was spent continuing the City Scroller project, and everyone worked really hard. This was the most difficult project so far, and the class started getting frustrated. I reminded them of our class phrase, “just keep coding,” and they managed to finish it a little before lunch. We then played a very fast game of mafia before we headed to lunch. After lunch, I expanded on what they’ve learned so far with OOP, and taught them about inheritance. They then expanded on their City Scroller project to add a block that would act like a player on the screen. They spent the rest of the day working on this while Amanda, Rhea, and I did everything we could to assist them. After class, Amanda, Rhea, and I had training for an upcoming workshop the students will be doing. Michael Frederickson taught us the basics of and how to integrate Python code to move Pixar characters around the screen. This was very exciting and I can’t wait for the students to do it next week!

Thursday

Today was our trip to ! The Square and Twitter programs were also there, so it was a great opportunity to meet students from other programs. Dolby had all of us do an icebreaker in the beginning to get us to mingle with the other programs. For the rest of the day, they randomly assigned us to tables and groups to encourage us to meet new people. Tara Murphy and Poppy Crum gave presentations on Dolby and how they come up with new innovations. At lunch, we had the opportunity to network with Dolby employees. Each table had at least one female technical intern or employee. They really took an interest in GWC and what the students are doing. After lunch they broke us up into groups to demo some of their products. This was very fascinating and a lot of fun. The day ended with a discussion of the girls’ experiences and what they liked about the tour. Everyone had a ton of fun!

Friday

Last week my students expressed interest in me bringing my personal desktop to teach them about the parts of a computer. So, this morning I did exactly that. I opened up my computer and talked about each part I had and what role that part plays. I took some parts out like the hard drives, graphics card, and RAM sticks, and talked about the process of building your own computer. During lunch, we decided to watch together as a class. However, after lunch our day was cut short due to the protests that were going to happen in the Bay Area. 

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