Due to travel, the third week at Gesu was limited to one visit by Penn Charter. Despite technological difficulties, the day was far from over as  the computer literacy curriculum turned into a fun day of spelling games that were recommended by the Gesu students. The first game was called Sparkle, in which Penn Charter students picked a word, and then went around in a circle with each person spelling one letter of the word. After the last letter of the word, the next person would say “sparkle” and be out of the game. Also if one misspelled a letter, they too would be out. The last person left in the game wins. Students also played a game where they would think of things like animals, country and foods that began with the last letter of the previous object the person before them said. Lastly, the students played a word guessing game called Contact.

The fourth week of the High School HeroesX summer program at the Gesu School, which was the week of July 13th, saw continued work in our computer literacy, career development, and big world topic curriculums.

To start off the week on Tuesday, Haverford worked on career development with the rising 5th grade Gesu boys. The students truly excelled (as they had in all elements of the summer program), showing an eagerness to go from learning about broad careers to specific jobs within those careers. Two boys especially strong at math wanted to be engineers, and thus Haverford students prepared slides and showed the students websites that helped them compare and contrast different engineering jobs. By the end of that day, these two students had focused in on electrical engineering and civil engineering. A boy in love with science, but also a fan of our coding curriculum, was enamored with the prospect of using software programming in the expanding field of biotech. Lastly, a boy wanted to give back to the community and become a federal agent, so the class explored the differences between FBI and CIA agents. With the rising 4th grade boys, Haverford played math games to work on multiplication, fractions, and word problems. By playing fun and interactive games, Haverford students noticed a definite improvement in the students’ abilities as the class progressed. For example, one student went from struggling with multiplication tables up to 4 and 5, to dividing multiples of 7,8, and 9 with ease.

On Wednesday, representatives from the Constitution Center came to talk about the importance of, and what it means to be a good citizen. Conversations ranged from being a good citizen at your school, to being one in your community, country, and with your family. The Center talked about the importance of exercising your right to vote, being an active member of your community, and helping in ways big and small. The Constitution Center also spoke of Black History in our country, where students demonstrated an impressive knowledge. Students from Radnor and Agnes Irwin, who are working on big world topics, worked on expanding this lesson to talk about citizenry throughout the world, forms of government, and overall civic engagement.

Haverford was back to work with all of the students on math and career development on Thursday. The day started by playing math games with the younger students, with a special focus on division, word problems, and money problems. Using coins and dollars helped make the problems tangible, which allowed tougher problems to be given as the day progressed. They were prepared to work on ratios and ordering the coins based on descriptions in the problem by the end of the lesson. With the older students, Haverford had the rising 5th grade boys and girls share with each other for the first time their careers of interest, before all students filled out a sheet noting the skills needed for their careers, and ways in which they could attain them. To conclude, a difficult version of math bingo was played with large numbers and fractions. The winner of each round received the pleasure of calling problems for the next round; the grins on their faces as they challenged their classmates was truly priceless.

To conclude the week, Penn Charter worked with the students on how to use Powerpoint. Starting with how to make a nice opening slide, the day progressed to include adding transitions in between slides (a favorite for students), selecting proper presentation themes from the powerpoint menu, citation pages, and concluding slides. Students were then tasked with researching their favorite animal, and making a presentation to give to the class on it. Animals ranged from puppies, to wolves, to even ligers! The presentations were beautifully prepared, both from an aesthetic viewpoint, as well as the information contained within.

The second week during which High School HeroesX worked with The Gesu School saw similarly encouraging signs as the first.

The week started with Penn Charter running the second week of their coding/computer literacy curriculum. Students continued to use the MIT program Scratch, this time learning how to: rotate a virtual character, make it speak, and create a thought bubble over its head. This session ended with a competition: the first student to make their virtual animal walk 10 steps forward, rotate 15 degrees counterclockwise, and then think “Coding is fun!” would win. Students eagerly raced to the finish, and though there was technically only one winner, Penn Charter was amazed at the speed that all of the students were able to complete the task. Perhaps even more touching was seeing students help their peers complete it after they had finished it themselves.

Later in the week, Radnor High School and the Agnes Irwin School (AIS) partnered up to talk with the Gesu students about a concept which impacts us every day: food. Radnor and AIS started by asking the students what they knew about food, where it comes from, and examples of good/bad food. The day progressed to discussions about the USDA food pyramid, ways that society could make organic food more ubiquitous, and the specific macromolecular make up of food and how that affects our bodies (ie. how sodium levels can fluctuate in the same food from different brands, and what that means for our bodies.)

To round out the week, The Baldwin School continued its career development curriculum, and played some math games with Gesu girls in grades 3-5. In the second installment of the career development curriculum, Baldwin tasked the girls with using websites in order to further their knowledge about their careers, and then to complete a worksheet that detailed how to best prepare for it. Some of the research included: what middle and high school courses to take, what to do outside of school, and what to expect in the field (is it growing? do I need a masters?). Afterwards, the girls played various math games, including a crowd pleaser “Math Bingo”, in which multiplication tables were practiced in order to fill out the boards.

The past week was the first week in which High School HeroesX worked with The Gesu School in North Philadelphia. Before describing the exciting work done between HSHX chapter schools and Gesu students, we want to provide a bit of background on Gesu.

Realizing that it would be quite difficult to see if high school graduation rates were tangibly improving with our work in just one year, HSHX sought to find a school to partner with which already had strong performance in this regard. In so doing, we felt that we could learn from an already strong program, while working with them to find areas which still needed improvement. The Gesu School (K-8) seemed like an ideal partner. In a city where approximately 65% of public high school students graduate from high school in four years, more than 90% of Gesu alumni graduate high school on time, and of those graduates, 85% go on to college or post-secondary education. Also, as with many of our participating chapters, Gesu finds an importance in single gender education. By working with already high achieving students, HSHX hopes to see what can be done to provide the best platform to not just graduate high school, but graduate it with the tools necessary to thrive in the "outside world". Additionally, we will  update shortly our criterium for the winner, which will be found here.

To kick off the week, our Penn Charter chapter worked with Gesu 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders in the beginning of a comprehensive Computer Literacy curriculum (photos below).  Students were first given a basic real world challenge: how would they get from the Gesu 5th floor computer lab to the outside recess field. In groups, the students had to write the directions on an index card. When the students read aloud their directions, they realized they forgot, as expected, basic instructions such as "to stand up" and "turn the door-knob". The point of the exercise: for students to realize that while coding on a computer, they must state every single detail, no matter how seemingly minute, in order to ensure their instructions will move from thoughts to actions on the computer. 

Students then learned how to translate these ideas to the MIT coding program Scratch. Students started by coding for a cartoon fox to move around the screen. By the end of the day they were writing their names on the screens, adding other character movements, and learning how their codes translated on the program. The goal of this curriculum is for the students to learn more about coding, since it is experiencing tremendous growth as a career path, and is extremely applicable to many facets of the 21st century, despite not being heavily taught in traditional education.

Later in the week, the Baldwin School came to Gesu to teach about Career Development (photos below). Using a version of a curriculum generously shared with HSHX by the Netter Center at the University of Pennsylvania, Baldwin, an all-girls school, worked with Gesu female students in grades 3-6 to discuss careers that might interest them. Students talked about different things they use every day, and what occupations might be involved in the production of those items. Students were then assisted by the Baldwin students in filling out worksheets which asked questions such as their favorite school subjects, hobbies, and other interests. They were then shown websites, such as this one by kids.gov, to further explore careers that might appeal to them. To end the day, students filled out a sheet of a potential career for them, and how they could learn more about it. While the end goal of this curriculum is for students to identify what careers interest them, it is designed to have them spend time examining things such as what subjects that career is intensive in, what level of education one needs to go into it, and if it’s in a growing sector of the economy that is likely to provide many jobs in the future. The Haverford School conducted a near identical curriculum on a separate day, except this time with the boys of those grades.