Today, Monday, August 19th, 2024, marked another day in the KCCA 3-week boot camp. As I woke up, I was not greeted with sunshine and singing birds but rather a downpour of heavenly water.
Yeah, throughout that morning, it was all rain and no stops. I had to run through the rain to get into the class. I forgot to pick up my umbrella as I left home. I’m quite lucky I didn’t catch a cold or slip over on the wet floors 😅
Because of the whole rainy situation, I had to start the class at 9:30 am instead of the usual 9:00 am. 30 minutes was enough for everyone to settle down as the rain started reducing in heaviness (So to say 🙂)
As I entered the building, there was no power. I believed it was due to the rain. So, I went into the utility room to turn on the generator. I did my checks, everything looked good with the machine, the fuel tank was full, the plugs were good, and the other little valves ok. I turned it on and switched the power supply.
I gleefully and gently walked back into the classroom, because it was still raining but not as heavy as before though, so the floors were still wet and I did not want to fall that morning 😂
As I came back into the classroom, we checked all the sockets and light switches, but none of them were working. It was like the building didn’t receive the power supply. I went back to the room where the generator had been placed and continued checking the circuit board multiple times to ensure no one touched anything.
Despite that, nothing worked. I was so sad, but what I was sadder about was the class to be held today. I quickly remembered how my students reacted in the first class saying it was boring, and to them uninteresting.
During that class (“the boring one”) 😂, there was light and everything, I just wanted to know them that’s why I just taught normally. Now, there was no power, and some of them even had dead laptop batteries which they wanted to charge in the class.
Not only that but now, there was no screen to show the slides I had prepared for the class. According to Nigerians, “gan gan”, the class that morning was due to be a boring class. BUT!!!
An idea flew into my head, maybe the wind blew it into the classroom or something, but I picked it up. I remember giving my students weekend homework. Bullseye!
“How about I tell them to redo it again, because I went through the homework most of them did, and they just skipped a few instructions I gave”
Not just the homework now, but before that, I spoke about being arranged. (I tried “ooo” 😂!) One idea I know and run by anytime I’m speaking to people, mostly of the younger age is the fact that words are not enough. No matter how important that thing is, because of their young age, they are more prone to distraction than ever. So to always make sure they’re in tune, I just try my best to speak outside of what I’m talking about but still in relation. Cracked a few jokes here and there, used objects in the class, and played with their imaginations too.
When they started learning, or as they are still learning, the way they write HTML is still just plain. There’s no indentation and sometimes, they mess up the whole structure of the file. So, I just decided to use the whole power-down situation to kill two birds with one stone.
Teach them how to properly write code, and give them something to rub their minds together on. I made them understand that having a good arrangement within your code and its folders/directories makes a huge difference between a lot of developers.
I gave an instance:
“There are some people that apply to different companies and they could have the years of experience needed, the certificates, the projects built, but once they, the employers, decide to look at your code on any project and see how hard it is to work through it, you tend to lose that job position because of that one problem”
Also, I just wanted them to learn the art of arrangement because they’d be moving to a higher class with more homework and projects, which means, It would be so complicated to understand what was happening in cases where they’d be asked to present the project and its code.
So, this is a screenshot of a slide with how I wanted their file arrangement to look like, at least.
Nothing more than the structure and making it easy to extract information. It’s not like I’m a pro at arranging stuff, but at least, better to do something with what you know than to keep waiting till you’re pro enough.
So, arranging the files they had created within this one week already, and working together to recreate the assignment I gave them. That was how I was able to keep my students busy without breaking the learning streak. Most of their laptops were dead so I grouped them with those who had enough charge on their laptops to carry out the exercise.
I’m quite grateful to God for one week complete already. The journey has been one alright, and I’m quite happy that within all these, my students haven’t come in to complain about theft or other things associated with “gathered learning”.
Well, that’s Day Five(19/08/2024), I hope you learnt something today. Rain, a blessing in disguise caused some issues with the power supply today, but still didn’t ruin the learning journey of my students. With fast thinking and Godly intervention, we were able to learn today even without a power supply! How does that sound? Somehow impressive (to me, of course 😀).
But still, I didn’t give up. It’s my duty to ensure these students learn while at this stage, so I have taken it as a call to do that (for a limited period of the boot camp only 😂).
And you know, this rain has been a prayer of many farmers who had their crops drying out. I’m happy for them (the farmers and rain anticipants).
So, My name is Samuel Urah Yahaya, a developer, a designer, and at this moment, a writer.
I hope you liked this article and if you did, follow me and give it a round of applause or more. Expression of thoughts in the comments section is allowed. Have a nice week and expect more articles under this series.
I hope this article was nice, and not time-wasting so… I’ll catch you in the next one.
Additional Links
More about me: https://samy01.netlify.app
Kids Code Club Africa — KCCA: https://www.kidscodeclubafrica.com/
The IDE I work with — Visual Studio Code: https://code.visualstudio.com/
NASA for providing the image used in creating the SamYfied head image