DCS Ambassadors High School Visit @ Bayview SS

It’s been a long time coming, and after some training and a bit of prep-work, Victoria and I were finally sent out on our first high school visit.   For our first visit, Diane suggested that we go visit one of our own high schools so that we would presenting in a more familiar environment .  That sounded like a great idea, but after going through some prolonged  e-mail exchanges, this plan fell through and we decided to jump into the deep end.  An e-mail came through telling us that Bayview SS (its up in Richmond Hill) was looking for some speakers from the DCS.  An e-mail was sent out to the Ambassadors asking who was available, and we volunteered to go.

When we went to Bayview SS yesterday, our day started at 8:45am and didn’t stop until 3:30pm in the afternoon.  We  spoke to a total of with four classes; two from Computer Science (gr 10 and 11) and two from Computer Engineering (gr 10 and 12).

I would like to say that it was a grueling day filled with lies, misconceptions and obnoxious high school kids, but that would be very, very far from the truth.  It was an eye-opening experience, and I think we managed to accomplish our goal of promoting computer science to these students.

The Presentation

Both Victoria and I had already accompanied a professor on a high school visit earlier on in the first semester.  I went with Prof. Steve Engels to Thornhill SS, and Victoria went with Prof. Michelle Craig to Fletcher Meadows SS.  Drawing on what we had learned on those visits, Victoria and I assembled a presentation tried to convince students that Computer Science was a worthwhile career path.

Our presentation was split into two parts.  In the first half of our presentation, we focused on the “whats” and the “whys” of computer science.  The second half  of the presentation was focused around the experiences and facilities that you can get at UofT.

In attempts to convince the students of the merits of computer science, we modeled the first half of our presentation around Prof. Engels’ mighty “three pronged attack”: appeal to their hearts, their brains, and their wallets.

So what does this mean?  First, we explained that the work that you do in Computer Science can actually help people by making lives easier (heart).  Second, we talked about all the cool stuff that you can work on, like the giant touch walls at the DGP labs (brain).  And finally, we talked about the current shortage of computer scientists and the aging baby boomer population.  This means that there will probably be a well-paying job waiting for them by the time that they graduate from computer science (wallet).   In order to reinforce all of these points, we had a huge deck of demo videos from the DGP labs that showed off a lot of the cool stuff that we do at UofT.

In addition to the “three pronged attack”, we also tried to focus on the human side of computer science.  We did not want these kids to think that they were going to become human code-monkeys.  Instead, we showed them some of the other opportunities that break the stereotypical code-monkey role of computer scientists.

In the second part of the presentation, we focused on our experiences at UofT.   We didn’t spend too much time on this topic.  We would have enough trouble as it is convincing people to study computer science.  We didn’t need slow things down and to turn the presentation into a sales pitch by going too heavy on the “UofT rocks!!!” stuff.  However, we focused heavily about the learning experiences that we got while I was on PEY, and while Victoria was in GSoC.

To wrap up our presentation, we would play a very simple game that would demonstrate some of the real world applications of Computer Science.  We played the game of 21, and if you don’t know the game, here is how Victoria explains it:

• The game requires 2 players
• 2 players alternate, and on each turn, each person gets to either add 1, 2, or 3 to the current number (e.g., if Player A calls 5, then the current number is 5, and Player B has an option of either calling 5 + 1 = 6, 5 + 2 = 7, or 5 + 3 = 8 )
• This game starts at 1 (i.e., the player that chooses to go first must call 1)
• Goal: Call 21! (i.e., whoever calls 21 wins!)

The entire point of the game is that the optimal solution can be discovered by applying a little divide & conquer, recursion, or FSAs.  Or all of the above, if you’d like.

@ Bayview Secondary School

I gotta give kudos to Prof. Engels here because his “three-pronged-attack” really got the attention of the students.

The majority of the class was wow-ed by the video demos that we showed.  When Victoria went on her school visit to Fletcher Meadows SS, she noticed that almost every class that she went to really liked the Shape Shop video.  We played the same video for our visit and to no suprise, most of the crowd was pretty impressed by the demo.  We also showed them the BumpTop demo and the students seemed to be impressed with that as well.  Those two demos really got the attention of around 90% of the students, but there was always a small percentage of people who would remain calm and cool.  Well, we got their attention pretty quickly when we started to “appeal to their wallets”.

It turns out that participants in high school co-op programs in Ontario don’t actually receive money for the work that they do.  So when I started to talk about my PEY experience and the kind of money you can expect for a yearly salary, almost all of the “sleepers” became very active and participatory.  What a world eh?

We also got a lot of genuine interest from the students as well.  We saw this across all grades, and in both the Computer Science and Computer Engineering classes.  A lot of the students there were genuinely interested in the field, and most of them asked some pretty intelligent questions.  I found that most of the students (including one of the teachers) were genuinely surprised at the idea that Computer Science != code monkey.

At the end of the day, we came out of the presentations with good reactions from both the students and the teachers.  In fact, Victoria was even able to offer some sagely advice to some of the gr 11 Compsci girls that we saw!

The department has notified us that some more teachers from other schools have sent requests for visits as well.  I don’t know if we will have any more time to do them, but we’ll definately try to fit something in before everyone is too busy!