Mindjoy <> Replit Mobile Pilot Collaboration 2022

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Mobile Coding Club Playbook

Facilitation

A Coding Club should be a place where learners are encouraged to be creative, curious and experiment. A lot of this comes from the culture you build through your facilitation methods and strategies. Here are some of our top tips for working with learners (while coding on mobile devices)!

Setting up Community Agreements 🤝

Always set-up community agreements (you can also call it a manifesto) in your first session with a new group of learners. This means your first session might need to be a bit longer than your others, as you will be focusing on group cohesion and getting everyone familiar with the Replit environment.

Community Agreements are a useful tool to come back to in moments of chaos, crisis or confusion - community agreements offer guidelines for behaviour that the whole group opts into. The “opting in” part is important because you’ll need student buy-in to be able to use this tool.

This means, if a student is behaving inappropriately or an incident occurs, you can say things like: “Remember what we agreed upon in our Manifesto?” or “Is that what we agreed upon as a community?”

For example, when learners were struggling with sharing the mobile phones we would remind them of the community agreements.

This process also helps learners (and facilitators) feel safer (and therefore increases engagement) because it builds a sense of belonging and autonomy.

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Guidelines for building Community Agreements:

Depending on the group size, you can conduct this exercise as a group discussion, or break out into smaller groups and then reflect as one big group. You can also use this exercise to set intentions as a group, and speak about what you want to achieve together as a club.

Keep in mind that you don’t want to have more than 10 agreements so try to keep it succinct, simple and clear.

STEP 1: Explain the process of developing Community Agreements

Let the students know that this process is to keep everyone safe and help create an encouraging environment where we all feel comfortable to learn and be our best selves.

STEP 2: Explain that there are two types of community agreements

There are relational agreements - which are around how we relate to and treat one another.

There are classroom agreements - which are around how we treat our space, our learning tools (i.e: the phones) and the ways in which we structure our sessions together.

STEP 3: Discuss why community agreements are important

We always like to ask students why they think it’s important we have these shared understandings of behaviour. Here are some of the reasons:

We can’t be our best selves in a hostile, disrespectful, or undermining environment

We need trust and safety to be able to work together in teams

Feeling comfortable and safe means each of us can be our most creative selves and make our best work

STEP 4: Help the students reflect on what makes an environment safe and engaging

Ask the students to think about a time when they really loved learning something, and then sit in a circle and share what about that experience made them feel comfortable and excited to learn.

STEP 5: Build out your community agreements through guided questions

You may already have some community agreements in mind - for example, agreements around how to use and take care of the mobile phones. It’s important that the learners feel like this document/manifesto is as much theirs as it is a tool for your facilitation purposes. Let them decide on the first few community agreements before suggesting some of your own.

Here are some questions you can use to guide the group:

How do we want to treat each other when we are in this space?

What helps us show up as our best selves?

How do we want to treat our environment/classroom?

What do we want to achieve in this space/time that we share together?

How best can we work together to achieve that intention?

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Here are some examples of the Community Agreements we had with the learners at Molo Mhlaba:

Each group may have slightly different needs so keep that in mind.

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We also had Community Agreements around using the phones:

While this might seem redundant after Community Agreements, we found it very useful to be explicit about these guidelines.

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Session Structure 🖇

Having a set session structure is another way to create safety for the learners, while also ensuring that you make enough time for thinking, deep work and play.

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Our sessions at Molo Mhlaba were 2 hours long, and we found that this was a perfect amount of time to achieve our missions each week (while also making sure the learners could stay engaged and not become overtired).

Here is how we structured their sessions:

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We ran the Molo Mhlaba sessions straight after school as well, so taking Brain Breaks were especially important.

On days when the learners where more tired or restless, we would ask them to code for 10 minutes at a time, take a stretch or bathroom break, and then come back and focus for another 10 minutes (it all depends on the group’s needs).

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Coaching + Group Management 👩‍👧‍👧

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Here are some tips on how we coached the group in each session:

Facilitators have a uniform/T-shirt that makes them easily identifiable

Separate the learners into groups of 4 (this way they can brainstorm as a team, and code in pairs)

Each group is assigned a number and a colour (which correlates with a phone, which has also been numbered and colour-coded)

Groups are responsible for:

Checking that their teammates are present

Making sure the team hand the phones back at the end of the session

Helping their teammates to problem-solve

Having a visible clock or a big timer helps the learners stay on track (and facilitators can refer to it to also help learners manage their time) - this also makes the learners feel safe, in control and able to manage their own learning.

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🖥 Setting Up Accounts

We find that it is easiest to use a naming convention (or the learner’s school email addresses) for usernames, and have a shared password for all your learners (especially younger ones). This helps if the learners forget their usernames or passwords - a facilitator can access a secure list of student usernames to help them login (example below).

We usually set up student accounts in advance and then give the learners a slip of paper with their own username and password on (which we ask them to keep in their school diary or somewhere safe).

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We have tested it where learners created their own accounts and it didn’t work well:

Students kept forgetting their usernames and passwords

They all had vastly different usernames which made it hard to keep track of student progress

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⚡️ Dealing with challenges

Getting the learners familiar with the platform is an essential first-step before jumping into coding - you’ll need to spend 1 - 2 sessions on this.

If students are very instruction-dependent, it can take a while for them to get oriented and feel comfortable to navigate projects on their own.

We recommend that the first project you take them through is a bit of a treasure hunt, which encourages them to explore the platform, make use of its different functions and try different ways of navigating through projects

For those with unstable WiFi connectivity:

It is useful to have a back-up Dongle or Hotspot (but make sure you test it and that it can support all the learner’s devices)

You can get the learners to pair and share devices to reduce network load

Otherwise it is useful to have some analog/unplugged coding exercises or no-device games prepared or to have a brainstorming session for a particular project that they want to build

To build a personal connection to coding for the learners (and help them contextualize it in their lives), there is often a need to shift their idea of mobile as a tool for consumption, to a tool for making and creating. We did this through Socratic discussions at the beginning and end of our sessions. Here are some of the questions we asked learners to prompt their thinking

Which do you prefer - PCs or Mobile? Why?

Why do you think Mobiles were such a big innovation in the world of computing?

What do you use your mobile for?

Why do you think mobile is empowering?

Add more questions

We had specific timed focus periods (there are also some free pomodoro timers online that could work well for this)

We had regular 5 - 10 minute body breaks where we made it a practice for the learners to get up, stretch and move their bodies every 30 minutes

We recommend setting up expectations around using the phones when making community agreements.

Set-up your projects in a way that allows learners to experience wins quickly and frequently.

Use the State of Change Method

Learners should be running their code every 3 - 5 minutes

The projects shouldn’t have too much reading for the learners

Celebrate wins. These celebrations don’t have to be big - we gave high-fives if learners completed a task, and we would have learners coming up to us to show their progress all because they wanted a congratulatory high-five!

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