'20-'21 Board Reflections
written by: Chase, Helia, Kaitlyn, Leo, Nina, Regina, Robert, Sophie, and Matt • Mar 28, 2021 • category: reflection • 5896 words • ~ 32 minute read • Subscribe to RSS feed for blogs
We’re just in the process of transitioning to our new board, and we wanted to take some time to reflect on this past year! It’s been an unexpected set of challenges in some unprecedented time, but we’re also so proud of all the work that we’ve done. Here are some thoughts from our wonderful board members!
- Chase - React Native Lead
- Helia - Python Videos Lead, JEDI
- Kaitlyn - Special Events Director
- Leo - Dev Team Director
- Nina - Special Events Director
- Regina - Special Events Director
- Robert - Emerson Lead
- Sophie - Logistics Director, JEDI
- Matt - President
Chase
Position: React Native Lead.
Uncertainty is scary, but from that uncertainty comes incredible experiences that simply could not have been planned. I seemingly accepted the React Lead position on a whim; I barely knew it and had no idea how I’d teach it, let alone teach others how to teach it. I guess I just wanted the opportunity to contribute, and I felt like the chance to develop and lead a completely new class was something there was no way I could pass up. Even though I was sorely lacking in experience and knowledge, I was wholly confident that my motivation to make technology accessible to the next generation of diverse engineers would be more than enough to make the class a success. I embraced the uncertainty.
Myself and our president, Matt, got to work almost immediately. We built a roadmap, started writing lesson plans, and began to recruit instructors to teach in the Fall. Our outreach team (lead by Chloe) worked tirelessly to find schools that we’d be able to teach at. We met with Facebook engineers to develop a deep understanding of the fundamentals of React. We emerged from that summer with a splendid plan, something that we were proud of and something that would empower us to reach a lot of kids who wouldn’t necessarily have access to technology education otherwise. But the best-laid plans…
The pandemic wasn’t getting better. We didn’t even know if we could find a school that would be able to support remote learning. We didn’t know how we’d be able to teach from home, we didn’t know how we’d coordinate lesson plans, and we didn’t know how we could even get feedback from our students. We were going in completely blind. We eventually did find a school, North Hollywood High School, and we did figure out how to connect remotely (a lot of zoom). The first few iterations of the class were pretty rough. I and a lot of our instructors weren’t completely comfortable teaching, especially over zoom, and it was hard to know how the kids were doing, since they were mostly muted with their cameras off. On the fly, we came up with solutions like using google forms and kahoots for feedback, and using that feedback we began to improve the class, and as we became more comfortable with teaching we started to get into a groove. But of course, such a peace could not last.
Remote learning hit everyone hard, including our instructors. Being full time students, it was hard to make this class a priority, so we ended up having a lot of turnover. Being the leader of volunteers presents a unique challenge: delegating work is a balancing act, you need to get things done, but burning out your team is dangerously counterproductive. With that in mind, getting to know my team was extremely important to me, so I could understand which team members could handle what, when. I definitely wasn’t perfect at this, but I was blessed with a group of individuals who were extremely motivated, bright, and passionate about our mission, and I have no doubt that without them, this class wouldn’t have been possible. Even the people who contributed sporadically were integral to making sure that we could teach every week.
We’re entering our third quarter teaching this class, and honestly I’m still not exactly sure how we’re going to do it. Our time slots are still unpredictable, our students are sometimes there, sometimes not, and we’ll still have to wrestle teaching this class with our full time class schedules. But despite all of those hurdles, we’re still going to do it. Flexible we’ve been, and flexible we will remain. We’re unified by our passion for making technology accessible, and together we’ll see this insane year through. Even though we could wish for this year to have gone smoother, the bumps in teaching this course will make it that much better when next we can teach in person. That I am sure of.
Helia
Position: Python Video Lead, JEDI.
I joined Teach LA winter quarter of my freshman year. As a then-CS student, I realized I probably should be involved in some kind of CS extracurricular by that time, and I chose Teach LA specifically because it worked with kids. Not because I liked kids, but because when I was a kid I always thought college students were so cool, and now that I was a college student myself I wanted to fan my ego and bask in the admiration of today’s children. I still wasn’t super involved then, though, and was even less involved the following quarter. It was the beginning of the pandemic and I was having a hard time doing anything other than gaining weight and reading my favorite childhood novels until 4 AM. But also, I hate having responsibilities. I usually either psych myself out of taking them, or force myself to take them and then flake out. This is why I live in constant fear of the looming inevitability of succumbing to capitalism and finding a job, and why I didn’t get that involved, and didn’t plan to ever join Teach LA’s board or lead an entire team to make videos on Python. But then there was this shiny new thing called JEDI as we neared fall, and I was very interested in it. Justice, equity, diversity, inclusion. There was a visible lack of it within ACM and the CS community at UCLA, and people wanted to change that. It aligned nicely with my interests; the reason I wanted to study CS in the first place, after the job security and pressure to pursue a STEM degree, was to fight the culture of prejudice and exclusion that permeates the field. So I said I wanted to become a JEDI. And they put me on the board. I had a really valuable time as a JEDI. The other JEDIs of Teach LA—Ashley, Chloe, and Sophie—and I, with help from Arjun and Matt, worked on things like accessibility in teaching, impostor syndrome, and community building within our committee.
As for the Python videos, I got asked to manage the breakout room for videos and I was like, I don’t know Python but yeah okay. I ended up taking on more responsibility than I expected—they made this new position for me, the “Python Video Lead”—but I knew things were going to be okay because in our first meeting, one guy made an active effort to talk to me and another laughed at everything I said. In the following weeks, we grew to eight members total, and we’ve had a really good time since. In addition to creating an entire series of videos about basic Python concepts for kids, we’ve had lengthy discussions on important topics like the legendary Harry Potter fanfiction My Immortal and whether haircut syncing with boys is anything like period syncing. Not to get emo in a blog post for a computer science organization, but personally, the past few months— especially fall quarter—have been a very uncool time. The Python video team is special to me not only because we had so much fun together, but also because it was pretty much the one place where I was never sad during the fall. It’s also where I learned I wasn’t all that bad at being a leader, after sitting on the sidelines for most of my life. So, thanks to everyone on the team: Props King Advaith for consistently being on top of everything, Ashley for being everyone’s biggest supporter, Austin for educating us on Armie Hammer, Drew for bringing Bike-short-for-Bichael to life, Einar for selling his soul to Final Cut, Seongbin for juggling video work with intern work and a weird neck rash and food poisoning and a different timezone, and Stephen for shaving his head like Avatar—among many, many other things. Each person brought an amazing energy to the group and I’m really proud of how much we bonded. Also thanks to Jun for randomly popping into the breakout room or joining us after 8:30 when we’re the only ones left in the meeting (thanks Sophie and Matt for that too, and occasionally other people), and thanks to Arjun for being such a great and supportive and cool JEDI lead. Lastly, thanks to Matt for running this year’s Teach LA and for his tireless work on everything from the icebreakers at every board meeting to the socials. It’s probably the first time I’ve ever felt so supported and comfortable at school, and that had a big influence on how well I was able to carry out my JEDI and Python video responsibilities. Every area of Teach LA this year has a bit of Matt in it, I think—not only because he was actually involved in everything and talked to everyone, but also because how he interacted with us as leads carried on to how we interacted with the members of our respective teams. So I’m really grateful for that, and I know everyone else is too.
Kaitlyn
Position: Special Events Director.
To kick off the year, over the summer, our special events and dev teams collaborated with CityLab and ACM Cyber to organize Cyber Day - our first virtual event! Although the transition to online instruction was challenging, the two gorgeous learning labs (Passworks and Cipher Salad) created by our dev team really pulled the event together. Overall, the collaboration was a great introduction to not only what goes into planning an event, but also to the types of roadblocks we would have to anticipate when approaching remote teaching later in the year.
In late fall and winter quarter, we collaborated with BEAM to create a programming/robotics course using Makeblock’s mBots. This collab definitely had its own unique set of difficulties, even with the experience with remote instruction we had gained at this point. Sadly, physical, real-life equipment rarely performs exactly in the way you’d expect, and the issues that cropped up were even harder to diagnose and debug over video call. On the bright side, I’m still amazed that the robots were distributed to our students so smoothly! Massive props to Laurel and the BEAM logistics team, and especially to Matt for assembling like 30+ robots by himself in one night (whew).
As with all of Teach LA’s projects this year, conducting this class virtually required a lot of flexibility, whether it be in communicating with our school, handling surprise changes to our timeline, or working out issues with our robots. Thankfully our instructors and students were all very accommodating as we ironed out the wrinkles in our curriculum. Luckily for us, a class like this is honestly pretty fun by nature. Just having a robot to play with in person made things pretty exciting for the kids! (Even if the robots weren’t always working 100% of the time) Given what we’ve learned from the first iteration of this course, there’ll be plenty to consider as we begin restructuring and streamlining the curriculum for its next run in the spring.
This year has been uniquely challenging for everyone - for us, the instructors, for the teachers that so kindly give us time with their classes each week, and especially for our students. Not all of our plans worked out perfectly, and not all of our lessons were as clearly understood as we hoped. However, ultimately what was most important is whether our students felt comfortable and welcomed in our classes - and hopefully that our time together was enjoyable to them. CS is absolutely an intimidating and confusing field to begin to explore. It doesn’t take much to feel discouraged in the face of such a monolith. But on the other hand, a single fond memory may help spark a lifelong interest in the end.
Leo
Position: Dev Team Director, Editor Team Lead.
How do you go about reengineering a backend? Well, like any project, you’d start by tearing down the excess, coordinating with the rest of your team… But what about a dev team? These two questions were at the crux of this term in a completely digital academic year for Teach LA’s editor subteam and the dev team at large.
Things were going strong in our first online quarter as Teach LA joined forces with ACM Cyber and CityLab for our first major completely-online event, which brought the basics of cybersecurity to schools throughout LA. However, as the reality of quarantine started to sink in for the dev team, a few issues started to rear their heads.
Teach LA’s dev team has always maintained a policy of being open to new members as an entry for students of all levels into computer science. Even online and catapulting into appreciable growth over the prior year, we didn’t want to change this. However, the growth was nothing what we anticipated. I think that to call the growth of Teach LA’s dev team astronomical would be an understatement.
The dev team grew from ~20 members to well over 40 as of this writing. The interest form garnered some 75+ responses, and the first meeting of the quarter saw almost one hundred attendees. It was a lot. Far more than I think Teach LA was prepared to handle, and certainly far more than I personally was prepared to handle.
Luckily, our president, Matt, was able to step in to help the dev team adjust to the growth, and restructure its management. The internal changes to the dev team that were carried out this year will completely redefine its direction going forward. Instead of the monolithic precedent of prior years, the dev team has been organized into each arm of its surprising scale: learning labs, editor, and static site teams all have their own lead dev now. I directed the editor subteam this year, hence reengineering the backend, from the start of this blurb.
The editor team’s primary goal for the first half of the year was to switch from our unmaintained JavaScript backend to a brand new one written in Go. To this end, we succeeded. The editor team was also able to initiate a few new exciting projects with our collaborative coding initiative, and continue progressing along longstanding projects like classes. Read more about the projects on our dev page!
All in all, it has been a tumultuous year for everyone. In the face of these odds, our dev team has expanded in both scope and size, adapted to its new conditions, and started up ambitious new inter- and intra-committee projects. I can’t wait to see what happens next for our organization going forward.
Nina
Position: Special Events Director.
I joined Teach LA last year because of its mission to provide something that I consider myself quite lucky to have before coming to college as a CS major: prior exposure to and experience with CS. Computer science can be hard to grasp at first; from my own experiences in high school at least, there’s a certain intuitive leap needed for things to click, and it doesn’t really start making sense until that point. College is an entirely different beast from high school, with professors providing less direct guidance to students. As such, learning CS without any prior experience can be a much more frustrating and daunting endeavor. I wanted to help connect with other students so that should they wish to pursue CS in college and as a future career path, they would have a foundation to build upon.
Teaching was certainly an interesting and rewarding experience. I was mostly involved with the Python class at Emerson, and it was an enjoyable challenge to develop lessons every week and adjust our methods and the material we were going over based on how the students were responding and what was and wasn’t working. After all, isn’t it said that the best way to attain mastery of a subject is to be able to teach it to others? In the end, though, it was the flexibility, both for instructors and for students, and the variety of the speaker series and similar one-off events that really appealed to me, and so I became an intern to get more involved with them.
This was when the cybersecurity-themed collaboration with science educational outreach organization CityLab was just starting, and Regina, Kaitlyn, and I were invited to observe one of their event days to see how they operated. I really liked seeing how another organization approached teaching, how they incorporated a fun storyline into the day’s activities and pop culture themes into their workshops, all of which we could potentially take inspiration from for our own activities and events. After we became Special Events Directors, we planned to move forward with the collaboration, but then the pandemic hit and everyone had to transition to working remotely. Although the CityLab collaboration transitioned to a virtual platform, it still managed to go on in the end, which was in no small part due to the enthusiasm and dedication of everyone involved in the project. Major props to Alyssa, Leo, and the rest of the dev team for creating the amazing technical modules while we researched and designed the nontechnical module, and to our president Matt for providing the overall guidance for working together with CityLab. Getting to see the collaboration through to the end was very rewarding, especially since it was the first event I’d coordinated as Special Events Director.
It’s honestly been inspiring and humbling to see Teach LA making it through the transition to virtual learning and working remotely through the year so smoothly. The collaboration with BEAM and working with ACM-W on the upcoming Day of Code have all taken place in the middle of the pandemic. This year has not been easy, and I commend everyone for their dedication and passion. I have no doubt that Teach LA will accomplish even greater things moving forward, and I look forward to seeing it happen.
Regina
Position: Special Events Director.
When I applied to be a special events director, I just wanted to expose underprivileged students to computer science and give them the opportunity to find their interest in it. As for roles, I didn’t know much of what to expect, and looking back it’s been a very rewarding experience. It was also a lot of fun collabing with other clubs and making curriculum with Kaitlyn and Nina, my special events co-directors.
Starting off, we collabed with CityLab to put together a curriculum for a Cyber Day. To be honest, this was the first time I’ve ever worked to set up something with another group, so I was quite lost on how to approach it and how to really get the collab going. S/o to Matt for providing guidance with that and being a great role model for how it should be done, in addition to Leo and the rest of the dev team for creating the super cute modules which we provided to CityLab. It was a great opportunity to teach the kids about cybersecurity and a great training ground for learning how to collab on a shared goal!
After that, in fall, Nina, Kaitlyn, and I coordinated a collab with BEAM for teaching the kids robotics. Though there were a lot of technical difficulties because it was online and it was robotics, it was a great experience. The kids were bound to have some sort of technical difficulties like how some of the kids’ cords didn’t work, or the code just wouldn’t upload to the robot, or just logistical difficulties with delivering robots. While there were a lot of issues involved and last minute changes in curriculum plans, I think at the end of the day, it went really well! The kids were really excited and happy, the collab went well, and even though the documents might’ve been a bit confusing, we laid a really great groundwork for a reusable curriculum for BEAM in the future. We also met Laurel and all the other BEAM people and are probably going to continue working with them, standardizing the curriculum for use in the future.
Continuing on, close to winter break, when ESUC reached out to our organization, I wanted to lead a booth for eWeek Kid’s Day by creating a learning lab website for it. It was rather last minute and Matt was able to help me quickly put together a solid team of 3 TLA dev members, s/o to Darren, Getty, and Trevor for doing some great work, and set up a collab with Creative Labs, in addition to pulling in Karen, our amazing designer who literally designed the whole website. In terms of Creative Labs, special s/o to Bryan and Arjun for being amazing and guiding the dev side of things, and Maggie for giving us great UI/UX feedback. We couldn’t have done it without Karen or Creative Labs, and I really appreciate all their help. Also in terms of brainstorming and curriculum, s/o to Nina and Kaitlyn for always being down to bounce ideas and having my back when I needed anything.
Going into leading this learning lab as a PM, it was challenging and scary and, looking back, I definitely could’ve been better at communicating, among a lot of other things. I helped the new devs out, even though I wasn’t necessarily qualified, and learned about design and accessibility with Figma. It’s been a very rewarding experience, and even though it was quite stressful at times, with everything planned out finally—the beta test being next week, the event a day after, and the second event in a couple weeks after that—I’m really proud of us for making such a polished Learning Lab. Most of all, I’m excited for the kids to learn how the web works and be amazed by it!
Overall, it’s been a great year with TeachLA. Surprisingly, even with this remote setting, the kids were all super excited to learn more, and I also learned so much about tons of different things. Even though I joined TeachLA two years ago to just have an opportunity to expose students to computer science, TeachLA has really grown to be more than that. It’s definitely been a good time and I’m excited to see what TeachLA will become in the future!
Robert
Position: Emerson School Lead.
As a college student, getting up at 8AM is difficult for me. However, it’s been well worth it to do so for our weekly Tuesday class, because being a School Lead has been such a rewarding experience! Our team of instructors has had a wonderful time designing innovative curriculum materials and working with kids on some fun code. Although the virtual format for teaching posed some challenges for engagement, I’m proud of how we’ve been able to creatively problem solve and continually reflect on our teaching to give our students the best experience possible. Here’s a couple lessons I’ve learned leading a team of eleven amazing instructors (shoutout to Celebi, Dominic, Joshua, Jun, Lauren, Nico, Oscar, Remas, Samantha, and William!).
Keep your plans flexible
I’m the type of person that loves detailed plans—I remember I once planned a family vacation down to the hour when I was nine. However, I’ve learned that things almost never go exactly the way you planned them. For our Winter quarter, we originally envisioned teaching an ambitious curriculum that covered all the fundamentals of Python. Although parts of this curriculum plan worked in previous quarters, we quickly realized that our class would benefit from additional reinforcement of key concepts and focusing even more on project-based learning. We had to change our plans two to three times throughout the quarter as we continually gauged where the class was at. Despite the many changes, everything worked out great! Things don’t always need to be planned extensively to be done right.
You get what you put into your class
We’ve all had great teachers in our lives that have inspired us to learn. However, we often don’t think much about how much work it takes for them to prepare lessons that stick with us for years. The more time and effort that you spend making the curriculum exciting and interesting, the more engaged your students will be. During our Winter 2021 quarter, we were lucky to have a fantastic team of instructors that continually raised the bar on our curriculum materials. They created innovative ways to present our curriculum, from creating a “choose-your-own-adventure” booleans storyboard to making an interactive game of Jeopardy to close off our quarter. When we presented these fun and innovative activities, we noticed that the students were much more engaged in the material and were excited to dive into the coding. Of course, it is always a pleasure to teach students that love the material as much as you do.
Have fun with everything you do!
If you think the material is boring, so will your students—simple as that. If there’s any material that you feel is not interesting or not applicable, don’t be afraid to cut it out from the curriculum. We spent a lot of time refining and simplifying our curriculum to make sure that we taught just the essentials for our students to jump into coding. Our goal is always to increase exposure and awareness to computer science, not to lecture students about the semantics of programming. We also integrated lots of cool demos on other aspects of the tech field, such as machine learning and brain-computer interfaces, to show how exciting technology is. All of this helped immensely in making our class a more enjoyable experience for both our students and instructors.
I’m so grateful to have worked with such a great team of instructors. We do impactful work and make sure to have lots of fun while doing so. Can’t wait for what’s next!
Sophie
Position: Logistics Director, JEDI.
I joined Teach LA a little over a year ago after months of struggling to find a student organization on campus that I connected with. Thanks to its welcoming atmosphere and its incredible mission, I quickly became more involved by helping out with the Scratch class at Brockton Ave Elementary (shoutout to Pragati, Helia, and everyone else who I met on the Brockton team!). When board applications were released at the start of Spring Quarter, I wasn’t sure if I had a shot at becoming Assistant Logistics Director given my lack of experience and limited computer science knowledge, but I applied anyway. As cliche as it sounds, this may have been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made; I met some amazing people along the way, and I’m so proud of everything we’ve accomplished.
Following the transition to virtual learning, reimbursement requests and many of the other responsibilities typically associated with the Logistics Director role were no longer necessary. As a result, I spent most of my time planning virtual recruitment and took on the responsibility of creating pedagogy activities for the start of weekly curriculum meetings. Recruiting new members in traditional ways proved to be a more difficult task than I expected given that virtual club fairs do not typically have good attendance. Nevertheless, Teach LA grew exponentially at the beginning of the 2020-2021 school year, likely as a result of incoming freshmen searching for a sense of community in the face of pandemic isolation. Since many of these new members lacked teaching experience, I began to create weekly activities that took a similar format to the “Um Game” I remembered Matt introducing during one of the first Teach LA meetings I ever attended. Although some of these activities may not have been a success, I think many of our members appreciated the opportunity to learn more about pedagogy while simultaneously connecting with fellow instructors. Shoutout to Matt for all of his help with these weekly curriculum activities and to Nikhil for letting me hijack the first 15 minutes of his meetings!
Another important aspect of my involvement in Teach LA this past year has been the JEDI program. So many communities are excluded from tech and made to feel unwelcome in computer science and other STEM fields, so I want to do everything in my power to make Teach LA, and ACM in general, as accessible as possible to UCLA students of all backgrounds. The OCD + ADHD Allyship Space I hosted with Arjun may be one of my proudest accomplishments of college thus far. Getting an opportunity to share my experiences while discussing with and learning from others was unforgettable, and I want to thank Arjun and Sharvani for all of their hard work and dedication to the JEDI Program!
I’m so excited to take on a new role within Teach LA and can’t wait to see all of the incredible things we continue to accomplish this coming year (hopefully in person)!
Matt
Position: President.
Wow, this has been an insane year. I didn’t expect for us to stay remote for all of it, but I’m so proud of how our entire team managed this transition. We shifted almost all of our classes to remote instruction over Zoom, and experimented with virtual Kahoots, take-home worksheets, demos-over-video-call, and all sorts of teaching methods. We even started a Python videos team, led by our own wonderful Helia! While we had some rough patches - especially struggling with engagement and attendance - I’m so proud of everything that our teaching team did. Shoutouts to our returning school leads: Nikhil & Malak for Python, Arjun for AI & ML; and our new school leads for our existing programs: Milo & Eden for Scratch, and Robert for Python!
We also did quite a few new things on top of the virtual transition, and I’m grateful I had the chance to participate. We kickstarted our brand-new React Native class targeted towards high schoolers, supported by a team over at Facebook. I led the first few meetings, fleshed out the curriculum, and taught the first few lessons, but I want to give hats off to Chase for taking over as a school lead and dealing with all sorts of unexpected hiccups. We also collaborated with CityLab and BEAM to teach cybersecurity and robotics with Scratch respectively; huge shoutouts to Regina, Nina, and Kaitlyn for managing these new virtual collabs!
Under the amazing leadership of Arjun and Sharvani, Teach LA joined the brand-new JEDI program! Our superstar JEDIs - Ashley, Chloe, Helia, and Sophie - made great steps to make Teach LA a more inclusive community. They incorporated accessible content into our pedagogy trainings, ran a discussion-focused event on impostor syndrome, and overall took steps to make Teach LA a welcoming place to be! I loved supporting them, attending their meetings, and listening to them plan and discuss at brainstorms!
We also completely revamped the internship program this year! Working with our sage advisor Bonnie, we focused on three sets of key changes: a clearer and more inclusive application process, formalizing the training process, and creating practical hands-on projects. We did a lot to standardize our application process, including clear asks on desired skills, making sure that every application was reviewed and interviewed by at least three different people, and standardizing scoring. You can read more about our process in our internship blog post.
On top of those changes, we were much more involved in the winter quarter internship training process. We formed three cohorts - teaching, events, and dev - and paired interns with existing officers in the role. Cohorts met weekly or biweekly to work towards a final project, and worked on practical skills throughout the quarter! I specifically led the dev cohort, where Teach LA’s dev team ran a set of structured lessons on topics ranging from React to CI/CD to intros for PM, design, and backend! Special thanks to Leo for helping out with a few of the training sessions, and Rucha + Karen for being guest speakers!
And finally, this reflection wouldn’t be complete without discussing our dev team. Due to some unforeseen circumstances, I stepped in as the interim Dev Team Director for Fall ‘20 and Winter ‘21. I had the pleasure of onboarding over 20 new developers over two quarters - which was equally tough as it was rewarding! Over the summer, Leo and I recorded our 18-video Learning Labs Crash Course, which was a great learning resource and a step towards standardizing dev training. I led our collaboration with QWER Hacks, where I wrote, produced, and edited videos on React, Firestore, using them together, and the education track - which was so much fun! And, I ran our projects meetings, trying all sorts of new dev training techniques: from long-winded walkthroughs, to Kahoots with cash prizes, to quick code and tooling demos, and continual feedback in the process.
I also had the chance to kickstart some new projects! In fall, we started three new learning labs: Cookie Jar (on internet cookies) and Selector Safari (on CSS selectors) run by Teach LA veterans Alyssa/Rachel and Lisha/Janis respectively; and Bias By Us, a learning-lab spearheaded by three first-years before the quarter even started (shoutout Jiin, Nareh, and Matthew). In the winter, Regina led our first collab with Creative Labs: Playnet, a tech demo/walkthrough of how the internet works designed for virtual fairs/booths. On short notice, we also scrambled together a team for Dev Pathways, an internal tool for ACM to consolidate its dev training resources; shoutout Einar, Christine, Nathan, and Nicole! Our static site ballooned in features, from more class pages to a blog and internal reports to a dev page. And, I wouldn’t be doing learning labs justice without introducing Buffer Buffet, the dev intern project focused on addressing problems in CS33; special shoutout to Jamie and Alyssa for sticking with me on this one.
And of course, there is so much more I want to talk about, and so many more people I want to thank; but at the same time, you’ve probably got other things to do. All in all, I am so, so proud to have worked with all these amazing people to continue Teach LA’s mission: making CS education more accessible. If you see any of them, give them some props - they definitely deserve it. I’m definitely going to miss our graduating seniors: to Arjun, Bonnie, and Malak, thank you for sticking through with us until the end.
I’m also equally optimistic about our future. The new officers, interns, and president are leaps and bounds more mature and ready than I ever was. I’m excited to see Teach LA reach new heights; I hope you’re ready!
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