Every year after president’s day, our school has a week dedicated to “Agora Days”. The idea behind it is to let our classmates teach us a class about any topic that doesn’t have to be related to school. Some popular ones are “Crazy Milkshakes”, “Ultimate Frisbee”, etc. This year I decided to teach a class about using basic python in game development. We were making a retro single player video game, space invaders, into a 2 player game. I didn’t think I would have been able to do it by myself, so I asked one of my friends to co-teach it with me. We started preparing for it about 2 months in advance, meeting once or twice a week about learning what we were going to teach, making schedules, and revising plans. We had to create 2 different schedules, and we had to change the code we were going to give them 4 times. We also had to create 2 documents describing how to download some software before even meeting our students for the first time. This process gave me a good insight into how work-intensive being an educator can be. The week before our classes, we were on calls for hours each day to prepare and be ready for anything that could go wrong.
And finally, the day was here. It was time to use everything that we had been making to have the best experience possible for our students. On the first day, we had planned to focus on introductions and troubleshooting the software installation and make sure the initial (single-person game) code we provided was working. However, plans changed when we found out that everyone’s code was working and running smoothly. It was good to see that our instructions were in-depth enough for people to get them right without live help, but the bad thing was that we might not have enough content to cover the four one-hour classes. As we moved forward in the week, we had to go slower than we would have liked, but we still were not going to use all of the days we had. So we improvised and used the last day as a day for them to customize their programs and use what they had learned for the past 3 days.
Because we only had 4 days for the entire camp, we had to help them along the way, but it seemed like overall they had a good understanding of how the different parts of the code worked. It was a lot of fun to see what they had achieved in a mini showcase at the end of the last class. Agora days was overall a really enjoyable week, and I think I’m going to teach another class next year.