By Adi Salcinovic | Program Coordinator
Number of volunteer instructors: 7
Average number of students: 50
Number of workshops held: 2 times a week for two hours
Type of classes held:
Introduction to mathematics, physics, chemistry, English, German and extracurricular activities such as programming and robotics.
General Classes
During the past quarter, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we are still unable to enter the orphanage so all of our Afterschool activities have to be held online. December was the month when the children really needed instructive classes, because they were prevented from going to school and they really needed help with homework and preparation for tests. At the end of December, as the end of the first semester is approaching, the beneficiaries of our program went to school in groups, one group of children goes one week, and another group goes the next week. It was very difficult for them, especially for students from 5th to 9th grade of primary school, when they had online classes, but they only received work materials from teachers via e-mail and google classroom.Twice a week we worked for two hours via MS Teams, Zoom and Google Meets platforms. That way, children successfully completed the first semester in December. During this period, beneficiaries were also on vacation and we organized lots of different online educational yet fun classes.
By this point, everyone is feeling burnt out from all the online classes, so we are really trying to be creative and give them fun online activities to make learning more interesting. One example is that we had a couple of students from 9th grade and first year of high school who had lots of problems with math and physics. We found a solution by writing all the formulas directly and also asked them to do a task/assignment via mobile phone or laptop and send it to us. There were a few difficulties because of bad internet connection but we managed to overcome that as well.
Online programming and robotics workshops
During these past months, besides the instructive classes of the After-school program we also actively held workshops in programming and robotics. As the situation is still bad with Covid-19, as mentioned earlier, we are not able to work with children in the classroom or to visit the orphanage, but we continued with online programming and robotics workshops. During these months, we held online classes twice a week for two groups of 25 students each. As the situation around covid19 has been going on for a year now, the children have learned to use information and communication technologies better, so it is no longer a problem for them to use various online platforms and educational programs. Through online programming and robotics workshops, we worked with children on strengthening their competencies, logical thinking towards understanding setting priorities, as well as understanding algorithms. Children were still divided into two groups, the younger group and the older group. The younger group learned through programming languages and applications such as Virtual Robotics Toolkit, Scratch, PicoBlox, ThinkerCad, Makeblock, etc. Virtual Robotics Toolkit is one great robotics and programming application for which we purchased a license and that way we were teaching children through the simulation of Lego robots to assemble and program them. There was a great interest among them, but also the will and desire to learn. Specifically, what they learned during this time is to understand logical and algorithmic thinking, and then programming and development of various applications.
The older group was full of enthusiasm and desire to learn so they tried to keep the equipment they used active and to teach them specific tasks. This group worked in HTML, CSS, Booststrap, Java Script, C++ and Pyton. At the end of this quarter, we noticed that they were better and we had given them the task of checking their knowledge during these few months.
Parties, hangouts and performances
Socializing and gatherings are reduced only to online meetings. In these previous three months we have organized with educators and two volunteers a couple of gatherings through the applications like Zoom, houseparty, Google meet. We also organized online social game evening through various web applications. For younger children, we organized a couple of online karaoke parties, where children had the opportunity to try to sing. We also organized a very interesting online gathering on the topic: Isolation over 5 days and symptoms of Covid19. The online socializing went very well and was really interesting. We also brough a psychologist Sedin who provided various consultations to the attendees and with his advice and words we wanted to encourage children and motivate them during these difficult times.
Plans for the coming months:
- Development of a networked educational platform and learning materials
- Internet classes - Implementation of IoT project for orphanage.
- Club of young robotics from 8 to 14 years
- School of young programmers for children aged 14-20
- Webinars on the topic of socialization of children and youth during a pandemic
- Education about independent living through online platforms through online workshops
By Adi Salcinovic | Program Coordinator
By Adi Salcinovic | Program Coordinator
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