Sometimes the geography of where I live makes it difficult to go to library professional stuff. Portland is just a hop away from me, but it is technically in another state. Seattle is so far north from me that it barely registers. Luckily, the Wahington Library Association and Oregon Library Association held a joint conference in my Vancouver!
I led a 4-hour pre-conference workshop on coding programs beyond Scratch. I had 16 participants from a variety of backgrounds, most with little to no coding experience. A couple had tried out Girls Who Code Clubs with an experience similar to mine in that it was difficult to hold the club member's attention working on one language for 9 or 16 weeks.
I was really jazzed to lead this workshop...
And then I was freaked out. Talk about imposter syndrome! Who was I to lead a 4-hour workshop on coding? I don't have a CS degree! I don't know any detailed info about any coding language! This panic attack struck the day before the conference, but luckily I was too distracted with maker outreach to really get myself worked up.
The fascinating thing about our Perler bead project was how so few of them had used Perler beads. I specifically picked them as our binary medium because I assumed most librarians had used them at some point in their career XD
It's also really weird seeing your own workshop tweeted...
I spoke specifically on an experience that happened during our drop-in Intro to VR at Vancouver Community Library. We were hanging out with the equipment on a Sunday and one of our ASL Conversation Circle participants stopped by to see what we're doing. Luckily, my colleague Kelsey, who is also in the ASL Conversation Circle, could sign for him. The deaf experience in virtual reality isn't much talked about and our patron struggled. Kelsey had a stroke of genius and used one of the VR handsets to sign to our patron while he was in the Rift. It was pretty cool, but also illustrated the lack of accessibility with this technology.
I also spoke on my experience learning to use Unity and teaching it to Teens during my Teen Tech programs around the District.
On Friday, I partnered with my maker neighbors, Hillsboro Public Library and Multnomah County Library to talk about easy maker projects. We focused on entry-level projects and spent half of our session making with the attendees. It was super fun!
We requested tables in our session, but there weren't any. However, the conference staff were phenomenal and quickly threw some tables up in our room.
We also expected maybe 40 participants, but were blown away by how many people showed up!
Our group of presenters was only able to coordinate one meeting early on in our planning. The rest was coordinated via email (not the easiest task). We decided early on that we wanted to incorporate hands-on making in our maker session. My colleague from Hillsboro, Rob, facilitated the light-up tissue paper flower project.
It was so cool and I loved seeing people with their flowers all over the conference!
We received a request to participate in Frontier Middle School's STEM Night. Their coordinator heard about us from Heritage High School's Girls in STEM Day and was particularly impressed that we taught kids how to solder and asked us to partner with their wind turbine table.
Frontier's STEM night was a drop-in format so robot badges would have been very difficult in this set-up. I brought some hookup wire and had the students practice stripping the wire and soldering the ends together.
The school provided us with some LEDs and a hobby motor. After the students practiced on the hookup wire, we let them solder the LED to the motor and then demonstrated how the motor could power the LED.
It was a quick and satisfying project!
We've been using the same irons and tips since our first soldering project in 2017. It might be time to replace our iron tips and/or upgrade our irons.
My first programming assignment as Experiential Learning Librarian for FVRL was to plan a teen tech program and take it to the branches. Since we have the Oculus Rift and Oculus Go on loan from the State Library, my teen tech program should somehow relate to this technology. I didn't have to do the program until March, but I had to get it on all the branch programming calendars by February 1...so I made up a very vague description to get it scheduled:
I wanted to create some experience for teens that would go beyond just consuming the content provided, but actual demonstrate how virtual reality can function as a creative output for teens. I had no idea how to accomplish this...so, I started looking into how to create content for VR and came across several options:
Unity seemed promising, but I didn't know if we had the hardware to run the software. I worked with my IT department to work on getting it loaded on one of the district's training laptops to test it out. This also involved me reaching out to Unity and requesting educational licenses by filling out this form.
We were granted 12 licenses from Unity and were able to load the core software to our Windows laptops. These aren't new or fancy laptops and Unity struggles a bit on our older set, but we were able to get the basics up and going...
And I found out...
Unity is COMPLICATED!
By the time we figured out the Unity licensing, I had just a couple of weeks before my first program. So, I started looking around Unity for intro content.
I came across Unity's Roll-a-Ball tutorial and liked that it provided a good overview of many of the tools in Unity and several game mechanics, a bit of scripting, and wasn't insanely difficult (although I never got my last script to work...). I also liked the idea that if we got started and it sparked an interest in a teen, they could revisit the tutorial online and work at their own pace with (a lot more) explanation.
With Unity loaded on 10 district laptops and the VR headsets, I was ready to roll...
Teen Tech VR programming completed (attendees): LC (10), WD (5), Mall (8), WA (10), RI (6), ST (8), CP (8), GD (12), WS (3), VA (6), TC (8)
LC: Most kids were 12, making them too young for the VR headsets. They also headed to the library directly from school, so no parents to sign off for those who were old enough. The kids had limited experience with coding. I learned that troubleshooting 10 separate C# scripts before we could move on really slowed our progress. I will create cheat txt of all the corrected scripts in case we get stuck with too many errors.
WD: We had 2 high school kids and the rest middle schoolers. The older teens did a good job supporting the younger ones and made a lot of interesting discoveries in Unity. This group made it almost all the way through the tutorial. Learned we needed more information on Scene View camera controls. Updated handout.
MALL: We had 2 high school kids and the rest middle schoolers. Heather @ the Mall told me that one of our attendees, Terrence, had been in the library for the past 2 weeks and had several negative interactions with library staff. Heather said she was impressed with how well Terrence did during the program and was full of questions about things to do at the library. Heather later reported that Terrence returned ot the library the next day and had a positive experience with library staff.
WA: Rachael wasn’t sure how many kids to expect as Teen night attendance had been low during the last few sessions. We started with 6 kids and the numbers kept steadily increasing as the evening went on. We focused most of our efforts on the VR equipment and the kids did a great job of configuring the Rift, and helping each other in and out of the equipment. The Rift decided to disconnect at the end and took some late-night troubleshooting to see where the wires had become disconnected.
RI: Today Visual Studio gave up letting us in to edit C# scripts. I had to create several dummy Outlook accounts (all some variation of Jamiehatesthis@outlook.com) to get us back into the program. We also had a great teaching moment about building each other up. One teen was criticizing another teen because they were taking a long time to type in their C# script. I told the teen I was unaware they were already an expert in this and asked if they wanted to explain it to the others, to which I received a deer in the headlights look. I told the teen that feeling they had right now is how they make others feel when they say things like that. We talked about supporting and encouraging one another because everyone has different strengths. From Sean: “Just want to thank the two of you for coming to Ridgefield to put on a program for Teen Tech Month. The tweens had fun judging by what I've heard this afternoon.”
We also had our first roll-an-almond project:
ST: The teens did a good job supporting each other in the headsets. While working in Unity, they quickly picked up how to add GameObjects and then script them. After the initial C# script was typed and compiled in Unity, they did a great job troubleshooting errors in their code. They quickly picked up the next steps and moved forward quickly through the coding components and troubleshooting errors in their 3D games. They worked together to get everyone’s code working.
CP: Teens were really into the VR headsets, so we spent quite a bit of time on those. We had a homeschooler who had some experience with Python, but was really reluctant to use C# and kept comparing it to Python. Another teen had a Sony VR headset at home, but decided that the Oculus Rift was better quality.
GD & WS: This was an all-day outreach adventure! For most of the programs, we've only had 1 Rift and 1 Go, but I'm glad we brought all the equipment on the 2-hour drive out to GD! I wondered why they wanted their program 1-3 on a Friday, but I learned that they had early release all week. Some teens dropped off their release forms earlier in the week and the librarian kept track of it for them. We had a great experience overall and had the teens work together on the Unity portion. I have got a pretty good system of helping troubleshoot one C# code and then have that teen help the teen next to them while I work with someone else. WS was a slower after-hours event, but the teens who showed up had a unique experience and were excited to tell their friends.
I've clocked over 40 programming hours on this project. It was a great first project to get me in the branches and meet some of the teen patrons I hope to work with in the future! I also did a lot of transporting equipment and seeing all corners of our amazing library district :)
I am also quite proud of my ingenuity with adding velcro to some of the boxes to keep them shut!
