Week 1 and 2

Technovation Kicked-off!

We kicked off the Fall 2024 version of Technovation on Saturday with enthusiastic students and incredible mentors — we hope your student is just as excited as we are for the coming weeks! We are so excited to introduce the world of coding to our students! During this course, we want all students to remember that they are learning something new, it might be challenging at times. But! — learning to overcome those challenges and how to have fun with it is just as important as learning the material.

Before we dive into a full recap of our first meeting, we've got a few announcements to share!

Announcements

1. Mentors’ feedback is now published on CodeHS!

After every lesson, mentors in Technovation will give constructive feedback on the assignment progress of their students. Make sure to check the feedback on D2L and come to our “bonus hour” (TBD) if there are any questions about the feedback!

3. Notify us!

If the student is unable to attend any meeting, please let us know before Saturday via technovation@egr.msu.edu!

4. Looking Ahead

We'll see you again this Saturday, 10/12 at 10:30a ET for our third Technovation meeting of the fall, where we will review last weeks material and begin learning some new material

4. Questions?

As always, please reach out with any questions / concerns / ideas / feedback to technovation@egr.msu.edu.

Meeting Recap

Our students wasted no time getting started, jumping fearlessly into introductions and icebreakers! Following a brief overview of Technovation and the plan for each weekly meeting this fall, students in each cohort collaborated to draft their very own club contract, laying out their shared expectations and goals towards which to strive this fall. Check out the contracts below—we're impressed with what our students came up with!

Week 1 - 09/28

Technovation kicked-off with a small meet the mentors session. We then moved on to create a Club Contract – rules we should all follow during the club meeting. A brief introduction to HTML and CSS – amazing tools for website development.

Week 2 - 10/05

We started our meeting with making our own nametags as an icebreaker activity. We then moved on to learn about tags that are used in HTML coding, small Code Along activities with the mentors, and finished the lesson off with Exercises from CodeHS!

In both days students concluded the session with a reflection and discussion around what went well, what didn't go so well, and what excites them about the week ahead—and just like that, our lessons were up! Time flies when we're having fun—we're already looking forward to next Saturday.

Mentor Spotlight

The Mentor/Advisor Spotlight! Technovation is led, organized, and run by MSU students under the guidance of advisors from MSU and Ford. The Mentor/Advisor Spotlight introduces a few of our team members each week to help coders get to know them better. Feel free to ask mentors and advisors for more information about their hobbies and past experiences during the Thursday Bonus Hour.

To kick off our spotlight series, we'd like to introduce the Fall 2023 Admins!

Benjamin Yeboah Harrison (Lead Admin)

Joshua Twumasi (Lead Admin - Curriculum)

What are you studying?
I am a third-year majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics!

How did you become interested in computer science?
I liked math and realized how computers can advance the field of math.

What's something cool you've done with computer science?
Created a machine learning pipeline to detect peaks of molecules in solution.

What are you hoping to do with computer science in the future?
I am hoping for several things, but it is software engineering for now -- to better lives as and when they need to be.

What advice do you have for our students?
1,2,3 Do it! If it fails, try again. 1,2,3 Do it! If it fails, try again ...

What are you studying?
I am a third-year majoring in Computer Science

How did you become interested in computer science?
I got interested in computer Science from watching cyberpunk movies.

What's something cool you've done with computer science?
I have been able to build my personal website where I share the things I am currently doing with others.

What are you hoping to do with computer science in the future?
I want to pursue a career as a software engineer in the future.

What advice do you have for our students?
Try to be patient with yourself. It's normal for your code not to work the first few times. So, take it easy.

Sanaye Lewis (Admin - Advisor)

Sania Sinha (Admin - Advisor)

Here's to the next set of weeks of fun. The journey has only begun!

-The Technovation Team