All the best is in children, or How to find inspiration

Three years ago we tried to give a lecture for schoolchildren about what professions in IT are. It turned out that children have almost no questions - they know depressingly little about work in IT. And lectures are more likely for those who already know what he wants to understand. Otherwise - boring.

Therefore, we began to experiment. We decided to go with a topic that is understandable to us - we held a championship in robotics. A year earlier, we made the first adult drone contest in Russia, so we decided to move around familiar territory. Everything turned out: we spent an enchanting day in the society of three hundred young robotics, and they, and we, and the teachers were pleased, like-minded people and feedback appeared. It became easier to work: there was a game "IT project" about the development of a voting device for aliens - the plot is fantastic, the project tasks are real. Expeditions to our technical sites appeared, then an engineering workshop with a data center designer and robotic hackathons at Arduino, the Robolabs project ...
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But the main work in the end was the “School of IT-solutions” - our joint offspring with the I-KUB and “School of New Technologies” projects. This is a “school IT project”, when teams of students, and with them, tutors and teachers, are going to do something really useful in IT for school. And we help the process and invite IT experts from CROC and our friends from other companies - everyone who is inspired by the idea to share sacred knowledge with the fighting guys. Here we are supported by our partners - companies colleagues in the industry ...

What did the children already do? They did an auto-fill system for hot meals (the school had a complicated, multi-step process of submitting food requests), chatbot to find out the timetable in the familiar “what to do for tomorrow” interface, etc. One specific task - one specific solution.

And the race began on rakes. A special course for students on project management has appeared, trainings for children on testing, designing interfaces have appeared, and much more.

The first experiments and why we needed it

I work in the educational center KROK. We are doing three important areas here: we are interning students (here is a post about this school), we teach new technologies to big guys and hardcore admins (courses a la AIX hotstart for Linux professionals) and conduct seminars like test drives of iron from 5 million rubles for unit, where during the play sometimes spare parts are taken out “on hot” until the piece of iron says “hrrr”.

Three years ago there was a task to understand school IT education: to understand what is happening there and in what formats you need to go there in general.

After the first lectures about the company, it became clear: schoolchildren are penetrated by the greatness of the business and the steepness of the expert, but there are almost no questions and dialogue. Because specifically about the work they have little that is clear and there is nothing to ask about. Then we decided that the first thing that needs to be conveyed is how the work inside the IT project occurs. What people are busy there, where the task comes from, etc. They began to think about the formats.

Dive

What else needed to be done - to plunge into the environment, to find like-minded people.
In December 2013, the Robot for Life Robotics Championship was held for the first time. The idea was to give the opportunity for the first time to be released to the young fighters, who had just begun to deal with robotics. This need was voiced by educational partners from RAOR and the Kostroma Open summer school.

And it was a very clear format for teachers. Before that, all the dialogues with schools ended sadly: we did not understand what to offer, what formats to work in, but the school did not understand how to learn the expertise of a company and what specifically experts to call for, what task to set. And experts seem to be happy and ready to talk with schoolchildren, but how to do it, so that with the greatest benefit, is also unclear.

And with the primacy and the request was clear, and how to answer it is understandable.



Championship since we spend every year, this year - for the 4th time. By the way, every year more and more students participated in the organization - mainly from Baumanka. In 2013, they were volunteers and helped the judges in all operational matters, and in 2015 they were already co-organizers and ideologists who were responsible for a huge layer of tasks: the development of nominations, refereeing. Now many of them are no longer students, but still our friends and co-organizers. Teachers from Baumanka, the center of "Robotics" come to the championship every year, give feedback to teachers - what to expect on robotics at the university, what skills are not enough for current applicants. And teachers of robotics here are also actively helping with advice, and deed, and judging. There is even a nomination for "Arduino", where the guys assemble robots on the spot from parts. This is generally the authoring group of teachers "2I-NOT."



Robotics has evolved over time: we are raising the bar, we are mastering the method of express transplantation of high school students from Lego-robots to Arduino, and those who are directly serious are trained in the use of technical vision and other similar complex things. We make such robocacatons together with the club of sports robotics MIPT.

In 2014, we held the Coder Strike championship in sports programming, sorted out the format, met the guys who took part in such events, understood what was missing and what we could give them useful.

As a result, we found a format that allows us to give a primary understanding of work in the project team in 1 day: we developed an IT-guidance career-guidance game.
Arranged as follows:

• The schoolchildren who have gathered for the game are giving an introductory statement: “in 3030, the planet must be held for the holding of a new Olympiad among all the races living in the solar system. There is a data network and there is a data center. It remains to create a device that will help collect voices from the inhabitants of each particular planet. And they are not people.
  
  
• Children unite in project teams of 3-5 people. Each team gets its own planet and a set of requirements for the device (one inhabitant = one voice, the device must survive in the conditions of the planet, etc.).
  
  
• The skype expert connects with a xenosociologist who answers different questions about the planet and the alien society. At the same time, the expert does not give answers to questions about the device itself. He is a scientist, not an IT specialist.
  
  
• Then you need to figure out how the device will look and how it will work. The main difficulty is to obtain an exact specification, that is, to find out how aliens communicate, how they can deceive devices, how to identify and authorize them, what enclosure protection features are needed, what the customer forgot to specify in the spec that has been updated from the latest version of the specification by now, and so on. In general, everything is like on a public tenderer.

The result is a sketch of the device + state diagram of its operation. To accept projects come real experts, ask questions, give fitbek. Even at the end of the game we talk about project roles, please determine what it was more interesting for anyone to do, who it is interesting to be - an analyst, a developer, a manager.

After the game, children are already beginning to ask about work, where to learn it, and, finally, we get a dialogue.

With her, we began to regularly visit our friends in specialized summer schools and camps and conduct it in our office. The game is also our expert.

Over time, another new format was born - “engineering workshop”. It was developed by one of our engineers in the group of engineers - a cool specialist and a dad with many children. He conducts this workshop. Initially, it tells vividly about who the engineers are in various inspiring examples. And then he gives a task for the construction of a data center, explains the meaning of its basic modules such as turbine hall, cooling, UPS, diesel generator sets, and so on. Then he distributes packets with conflicting, at first glance, requirements for the data center and offers to assemble it from cubes according to the specification. Next - an hour and a half of resolving contradictions, finding out what the customer wanted to say, and so on. Then the delivery of the project. As a result, there is an idea of ​​how an engineer thinks, what questions he asks, what he looks at, how he evaluates a task. And the guys assimilate it well, because this is a living example that you can feel for yourself.

The next option is “expedition to IT”. For an hour we run with children through our office and technical sites, where the guys have a short conversation with our specialists about work in general and technology in particular. And then high school students make a video for elementary school students, where they explain about some technology in their own words and in 2–3 minutes. And here, too, it turns out a small team project with the development of an educational product.

Once there was a hackathon for developing educational games. We spent it together with the cool guys - the organizers of the Synstiklem Syndiket and the organizers of the adult gamejames DevsGo. It turned out the drive, the participants for 2 days developed several games and tasted teamwork in a short time, and the guy from the winning team is now a student and now he himself is doing the first CTF for beginners (scheduled for October 16).
I found the need myself - the fact is that inexperienced people are afraid to go to hardcore CTF adults, but here - please, everything is simple.

In parallel, together with a group of active teachers "2I-NOT" we developed and tried the program "Robolaboratory". This is a cycle of robotics tasks-projects for robotics circles and schools designed for the academic year. Each stage of the cycle (2 months) ends with a conference, during which teams exchanged experiences, evaluated each other's work, chose the best solution. Criteria for selecting teams could offer themselves, we discussed them together, decided whether it was realistic to evaluate them. At such meetings, students from Baumanki who were already working in engineering companies came to us, telling where the tasks that the guys were working on in practice and in production (search for the maximum, programmed trajectory, work with a manipulator) occur.

Projects

After these experiences, we came to the conclusion that the main task is to translate IT thinking. The main value that we can share is real experience in IT. And the best way to show what IT specialists are, and what IT works are, is to make a more or less long project with a clear result in the real world and with feedback.

So we went to the project work. Here I must say that schools have their own project work, but how far it is from real life! Children come up with something very interesting to them, or they have, for example, some kind of unverified hypothesis. An important criterion is for it to be creative. Then embody. It can be spent a lot of time, a lot of effort, but it will be fun to work in a team. They are praised, they are slapped. But it often happens that the result of the project is not needed by any user, it is often either hypothetical, or it simply does not exist ... It turns out that the guys get used to being praised for unnecessary things. The following is unnecessary. And high school students (and we are talking about them now), who are quite capable of serious interesting developments, get used to measuring the results of their work by how much they have worked and what an enchanting idea they have. And it is embarrassing for adults around - like the children have worked, it’s impossible to offend them, to ask difficult questions. And the idea of ​​work is distorted with each such project. And so on, those very future creative start-ups grow up, who are later trolled for co-working smoothies.

And the school, in general, is doing everything that can, and the teachers are trying to understand the peculiarities of the creation of these IT projects. But if children's projects really do not have customers, no users, it is not clear where to get and how to correctly identify, and the feedback is not the same as in our industry (head to head), but gentle, educative? How can a team of schoolchildren and a teacher find with them the meaning of a project that adds so much constructiveness and, excuse me, motivation to work?

The engineer does something that generally benefits people. In the limitations of the real world. He identifies the problem, then thinks whether to solve it (evaluates rationality), then proposes a method. And he thinks not only about implementation, but also support later.

And the children come up with robotic slippers for the grandmother - and at the time of inspiration they don’t think that the grandmother will not use them, and then they will come to them without glasses and break them. It is a pity, but the project is closed. So is the substitution of concepts.

What to do with it? We decided to show how the project work in our industry takes place. Well, that is, that there is a real user with a real problem and that it is solved with the help of IT.

So we recruited school teams that had active informatics teachers looking for conscious project activities for children, and held design thinking trainings for all of them in a few days. We have friends - “Platform 9-15”, they hold unique children's sessions on design thinking. And here we have together finalized the format for our tasks - an approach to a real IT project.

At sessions they were explained to the guys about empathy, about a problem interview, they trained, determined the user's problems. In general, we armed them as best we could with knowledge and accompanying guides, and teams of schoolchildren went to schools to identify the problems of users. And then they sent us the results of research and applications in the form: who is the user, what is his problem and why it is important for him that it be solved.

Each application for the project implied verification. For example, a survey of people at school (end users).


We worked the applications, then a tutor-student and an expert from a large company connected to each team (for a strategic vision of the project, understanding risks, etc.). Here we used the experience of our co-organizers - the I-KUB project. For several years now they have been carrying out the IT-workshops multistage program in Novosibirsk, where schoolchildren are doing projects for the orders of IT companies and the students-tutors also work with them. And the guys from I-KUB understand how to convey the meaning of such work, they know its volume.
And six months before the start of the project, I flew to Novosibirsk, we had a session on design thinking for the guys from the Ermine Lyceum, and we had a pilot team, slightly ahead of the rest. The experience of these guys showed what difficulties we stumble upon in the process.

Accordingly, further our students with the help of a tutor conducted research into development options, wrote TZ, smashed the task into subtasks, discussed how and what to do. And then for several months they developed their product, meeting once a week for full-time synchronization or stand-uping on Skype, working at Trello, etc., who organized themselves. In parallel, we had large general meetings: on sharing experience, on training in testing, on designing interfaces. We also met with us, at CROC, and with our partners - colleagues in the industry.

We connected experienced coaches to such meetings and together with them developed formats for school audiences. And they were also interested in working on such tasks. All the great meetings were helped by our friends from STEM games, experienced igrotechnics and facilitators. As experienced people, they gave good feedback on the finalization of formats.

In total, we had 35 curators and 38 school teams. With students, before throwing into battle, we studied project management and group dynamics, we worked a lot with meanings, etc. It was an enchanting day when we spent 8 hours in a row working with team applications, building decision hypotheses together with IT experts . The student team turned out to be a source of inspiration, surprise, and unexpected discoveries. Someone showed mega-enthusiasm, but merged at the start. Someone successfully led two teams for half a year.

Many gave excellent feedback, and this added a ton to the project. With the kids inside the teams, too, it was fun. There were teams that didn’t know anything at all, but they worked together, studied on the go and prevailed over all difficulties. There were also children who were advanced in terms of programming, who had problems with the union: each of them could do everything, but together they often could not agree. And teamwork was their own feat.

Children learned to work with feedback, to reason with managers, with experts, to search for solutions to problems and to conduct reflection, and not to defend and justify themselves.

Next to the teams were teachers, for many of them it was all new, anxious, anxious for children. However, they accepted what was happening, tried on unusual roles, sometimes complex, silent and observant, helped test projects, gave children from other teams a fitback at general meetings, supported teams during testing and implementation.

Then there was the defense of the project. At first, the teams explained the commissions, what and how it works, how much resources were spent, how they plan to support and develop the project, etc., and the commission asked questions. For example:

- Has your project solved the user's problem?
- Yes.
- How did you check it?
- 60 people went.
- What did they ask? Did you get a response that suits them?
- I do not know…

And then they thought together how to find out what to do for this.

In the case of an electronic library, where the book is identified by a barcode scanner and the user is skipped, the prototype worked, but it turned out that the students did not consider that there are books in it without barcodes (maybe they just never saw such) and this is almost all before the 90th year. We decided to stick bar codes, honestly enter everything into the database, and at the final defense, when we calculated the labor costs, we found that it would take 500 man-hours.

And then they also thought how to organize everything and how many assistants are needed.

Then at the final meeting our designers themselves went and watched what other teams were doing, showing theirs. The task was to collect rakes. Own and others. And experts could write tips on them. The result was a “rake wall” of such a plan:




Here children learned that someone could lie in the questionnaire


And then thinking about support.

We in vain called all this competition. Of course, this name attracted people, but the guys from some teams didn’t really want to share information between the teams right up to the middle of the project: “But we can lose the contest.” And by the middle, we also tasted expert feedback and exchange of experience.

In the end, of course, we awarded everyone who showed a working prototype (out of 38 teams, 21 reached the final).

Lessons for next year

First of all, this time we train our team managers more deeply - according to our combat program, modified to reflect last year’s experience and the very same rake. To do this, we have made a school of IT managers for student curators. Our students have been actively involved in the design since last year. By the way, those students whose groups have reached the finals (and not only they) have completely mastered the experience. With many changes have occurred. Two guys from our management team have already started teaching at Intellectual, some experts from the partner company have called in the team. I recently found out that one of the guys at work was promoted to a timlid thanks to this experience. One of the students is now working as my technical assistant ...

So, IT students will be seriously taught how to work with a team, and even a nursery (not all of them managed to visit their students last year so that they could build a good working relationship). Friends from the Kawardak camp help us with this - people with a huge and amazing experience working with children and adults in different situations and life events.

Secondly, in some projects there were misses by the end user. For example, there was a team that identified the task of the head teacher: many students study remotely, and a platform is needed. Wrote TK, made a platform. And almost at the end of the work, the teachers said that they could not use it: there was no time, it was inconvenient in this format. It turned out that while the schoolchildren were sawing the code, they didn’t dig much further than the head teacher, they didn’t get to the specific teachers with the prototype even on pieces of paper. Now after the selection of applications will be hakaton for prototyping. Well, at the same time on it we will identify those who really want to work. This is also important, because some of the teams of the last year fell off at the start of projects due to the fact that participation was not their own decision, and then they were not able to let them go on their own for some time. All the time watching from the shoulder, who does. They seemed to want independence from children, but in fact they didn’t give it to them - and the guys immediately got bored.

We plan that the children will have coworking for meetings. We want the groups to communicate more with each other. According to reviews of the first year, communication with other teams was as useful as the opinion of experts. By the way, one of the teachers said: “Usually, when we leave the contest, children discuss in the spirit of“ and we had better than these, and those had worse ”, but here the tone changed to“ but that team should be attached to this and that project ”, and this is great.”



Eliminate gaps in communication with experts. Students used to be afraid to seem stupid and did not ask any questions (although the experts chose their own teams and were ready to help everyone and everything).

We will conduct trainings for our teachers whose children participate in the project. Since then, we have experienced a lot with them, understood what we can share and how to help specifically in their work. Right now, we are having start-up sessions on design thinking for schoolchildren - they have teachers, together with our students, working in teams, learning the technique along with schoolchildren.

Another problem that we will solve is communication with parents. We worked with them a little last year. There were contacts at the level of “when to pick him up there,” but no more. My parents have a plan, and he, as a parent, understands me: you have to study well to pass the EGE, then go to university, practice in a good company, and find a job. The fact that right here and now, in fact, companies get in touch, gives an understanding about future work, some contacts with the student appear in the industry, we have not been able to convey this, and, frankly speaking, we have not tried too much. On the other hand, we do not recommend participating in the 11th grade now, because the USE must still be passed.

We also got rid of the word “competition” and called the “School of IT solutions” a program.

3 weeks before the start

So, “School of IT solutions” is when schoolchildren implement IT projects that solve problems from the life of their schools. The program lasts 6 months. Pupils work under the guidance of student managers. The program also involves specialists from IT companies - CROC, Cisco, etc. - provide expert support to teams. And we are supported by teachers from universities - HSE, Baumanka and others.

Children have already registered teams. This year there are about 100 of them. We are already holding design thinking sessions for all who submitted applications. On Monday, the final. After them, the teams will run to look for problems in schools, send us applications. In parallel, our students are learning and doing their training projects, are tracking with experts, are on the same path as their future teams, only with more serious approaches and in express mode.

And then we all go to the semi-annual race.

Now about the main thing that I have understood during these three years: there are schools, and there are active, but confused teachers in them, trying to help as much as they can, what they can. And there are fighting schoolchildren, even not necessarily high school students, who you wonder what they are capable of. They are eager to be adults and do something real. There are also students who are inspired by the idea of ​​helping students create useful stuff and get experience themselves.

On the other hand, there are large IT companies. They employ specialists, experts, masters of their craft. And many have almost no asset outside the companies - expertise and experience.And many, as I now know, are inspired by the idea of ​​sharing expertise with schoolchildren, but do not really understand how and where.

These are the experts I call to participate with us in our big program. What is required from the expert? Allocate time, listen to the team, listen to the student, give a fayback. You can see from the height of the experience and through the pain of your own cones, and they are helped and solid common sense. By the way, you are also a pleasure and invigorating new experience.

I also call students who are inspired by this idea and who are ready to lead a team of schoolchildren to the result for half a year, and before that to study with us in a fairly fast and hard mode. Because there are a lot of applications this year and I want to take on more children's teams. We see the guys in the sessions, they are cool. I promise: pumping / experience, our team in support, satisfaction and pride. Well, materials for coursework and diplomas.

And besides our program, there are plenty of schools, summer and winter camps, hackathons for schoolchildren, non-standard olympiads, where your experience and expertise are very necessary. Share them, fit into every movement, even if you don’t really understand how and what you can do, but you know that you have valuable experience. Formats will be formed along the way, the main thing is to start. Communicating with young people full of curiosity, audacity and courage, thirst to gash something real - this is a guaranteed reboot and amazing observations.

Links

• All contacts and details on the school here - www.itsolschool.ru
• Separately, my mail is NYanushkevich@croc.ru.