Neal had been Engineers Ireland’s representative on the education task force. Neal, with Mary, from the Irish Computer Society and Yi from the Irish Software Association were joint chairs of this morning’s meeting of the volunteer group. Mary was going to act as a facilitator for the meeting.
“Good morning everyone, welcome to the workshop,” Mary said as the groups settled in the conference room. “Is everyone here?”
“Everyone except Stewart and Daniel” said Paraic from ZWare.
“Should we start without them?” asked Amir.Amir, like all the volunteers, was in the workforce, but his and the others’ employers were supporting the ‘Cool Software’ initiative by releasing them to the project for the next three days. It didn’t mean his day-to-day workload had really gone away though so he wanted to get started as quickly as possible.
“We should wait until we’re all here, Amir,” said Mary. “It is important that the whole group is here. Everyone needs to participate, particularly at the start of the process. Even though they may not have much to add initially we’ll all benefit if we start the process together and start the planning together.”Mary proceeded to break up a bar of dark chocolate and pass it around the group.
“I work in the same company as Stewart,” said Alan. “I drove past him on the way in. He’s on the bike, he’ll be here in a minute,”Just then Stewart walked in, helmet and bag under his arm, followed immediately by Daniel.
“Apologies all, I underestimated how long it would take to get into town on the bike,” said Stewart.
“I couldn’t find the room,” said Daniel.
“Right, we’ve got the whole team,” said Mary, “let’s get started.”She moved up to the white board and started writing.
“We’re trying to address two main groups, primary and secondary students. The outreach sessions have to take place outside normal teaching hours; we think we’ll be able to get 2-hour blocks on agreed weekdays, generally the afternoon. Although some schools may accommodate sessions during school hours we shouldn’t plan for it, we don’t want to attract criticism around distracting students from the core curriculum.”
“Can we expect that we’ll be delivering multiple sessions?” asked Paraic. “Or is it likely that some schools will only get one session?”
“Yes, realistically our teams might only make the one visit to some of these schools so the first session has to be good” said Neal. “And the whole initiative is being staffed by volunteers. Member companies from the various associations have said they will support scheme by freeing up employees for multiple 1 day blocks, but a lot depends on people’s availability, the time of year, size of class etc.” He continued, “we think the sessions should be run by pairs of engineer/programmers so there’s an operational challenge coordinating people at our end. But the biggest challenge we think is synching up with the schools.”
Yi added, “however our working assumption is to develop material for three, two hour long, teaching sessions that can be delivered by volunteers from our societies member firms.”
“And not forgetting,” added Neal, “material addressing the primary school audience and material addressing the secondary school audience. At least, that’s the current plan. It could be up to six different sessions in the basic model.”
“Excuse me,” piped in Daniel. “What are we developing and delivering?”
“Right,” said Mary. “My bad for not stating the overall goals. ‘Cool Software’ is being proposed as an industry supported outreach project designed to excite and involve Primary and Second Level students in maths and programming.”
“About the Lego?” suggested Amir. “What is it and why are we using it?”
“Can I answer?” asked Yi? Mary nodded. “We’ve all read the reports from the task force report dealing with the general decline in student numbers and results in Science and Maths. The knock on effect is putting the whole sciences/high-tech industry sector at risk in Ireland. These reports consistently highlight the need to raise awareness and create excitement about Science and Engineering careers. But how do you create this kind of excitement? We decided on Lego Mindstorms, everyone loves Lego, it looks fun, is fun, and using the kits can expose students to real programming and engineering challenges.”
“And if I can add,” interjected Stewart, “if we’re doing technology outreach, we can’t assume a lot of technology support in the classroom, particularly at the primary level. You’ve got to assume you’re bringing a stand-alone self-contained environment on-site. You can get LM up and running from a single box, no need to install stuff in their computer labs, at least initially.”
“And remind us,” asked Amir, “what are we going to be doing here for the next three days?”
Neal went up to the white board and spoke as he wrote. “Our objective, as Yi said, is to develop material for two streams of three, two hour long, sessions. One set for Primary level, another for Secondary level. It may be that we’ll see opportunities to expand the programme, but these are our basic objectives.”
“Right,” said Mary. “We’re going to start this morning’s meeting by writing user stories. User stories are brief statements of concrete deliverables or functionality, mainly stated from the user’s perspective. For example ‘as a student I want to make my robot drive faster so that it wins the race.’ As another example think about ‘as a teacher I want everyone on a team to get involved in programming the robot’”
“Those two suggestions seem reasonable,” said Amir. “How do we capture them?”
“We’ll write them on these index cards,” said Mary.She handed out packs of index cards to the different groups.
“Ok, I’ll write up those two,” suggested Amir.
- As a student I want to make my robot drive faster so that it wins the race.
- As a teacher I want everyone on a team to get involved in programming the robot.
“Is it ok to have two different users?” asked Daniel. “Shouldn’t we treat them all separately, with separate meetings and separate planning?”
“Well,” suggested Mary, “if there were going to be two separate products, perhaps we could treat this work as two separate projects. In this situation it’s the same product – the outreach programme – just seen from two different perspectives.”
“What about the format of these user stories?” queried Daniel.
“We adopt the following style,” said Mary.She wrote on the board:
‘As a...
“It’s a simple way of capturing who is going to use the feature, their goal and reason for the goal.”
“I’ve just noticed,” said Amir. “I don’t have a ‘so that’ for the second story.”
“That’s ok,” said Mary. “You don’t always need a ‘so that’ clause when it’s obvious or the goal states the reason.”
“So what next?” asked Yi?
“We try to write all the stories for the programme,” said Mary.
“All the stories?” questioned Yi.
“Not all possible stories,” said Mary. “Just those we absolutely need to meet the overall goals within the limits we’ve identified,”
“Any more general questions before we start talking about the design of the programme?” asked Mary.
“Cool Software?” said Daniel. “I’m not sure about the name, should we pick another name? It’s not usually ‘cool’ to call something ‘cool.’”
“Thanks Daniel,” said Neal. “For the moment we’re considering it a code-name, we’ll get professional input later on how to brand it.”
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