My practicum site was the Cyberninjaz Camp located in Saint Andrew's Episopal school in Potomac Maryland. I found the site and the supervisor through my mother who signed my sister up for the camp in the years prior. I was looking for a way to spend my summertime and build my resume and my mom asked the Camp CEO Piankhi whether I can volunteer for him. Some advice that I would give to a future College Park Global Scholar on finding a practicum site is to start recruiting for any internships that you can the moment you land on campus so that you have a plan for your summer when you get out of school. I also recommend that you attempt to make connections during your time in college that can hook you up with internships and opportunities; through my connection with my mom I got my internship but I am sure if I did more networking during my freshman year in college I would be able to find more opportunities or possible practicum sites. At Cyberninjaz, I undertook a variety of tasks which included teaching diverse subjects such as game design, Python, and mathematics. During my first week, I familiarized myself with the GameSalad program and how to construct a basic platformer game. Subsequently, I tutored a third-grade student who had no prior computer science knowledge on how to code a similar platformer game according to his preferences. In my final week, I taught two more students, one in precalculus and the other in Python, which I learned in middle school.Even though my summer at Cyberninjaz ended once the school year began, I still actively work with Piankhi in order to promote the camp at a variety of events and pop-ups. For example, just a couple weeks ago I worked with Piankhi at Rockville Science Day and talked to prospective students and parents about what Cyberninjaz is and also let kids play some of the games that our former students have created. My involvement in Cyberninjaz provided me with a solid grounding in computer science, specifically in game development and software, such as GameSalad and G-Develop. During my time at Cyberninjaz I gained a new appreciation of teaching and how teaching somebody a craft can actually be really enjoyable. I realized at my time at Cyberninjaz that science is something that I can teach and pass onto a younger generation which makes me really happy that I can impact somebody's life in a positive way by teaching them a skill that might help them out in the future. I never really had any plans here at UMCP as I don’t really know what I want to do after I leave undergraduate school and my time at Cyberninjaz didn’t really drive me to one specific decision. However, hopefully I use my time at Cyberninjaz to earn myself a job at an established engineering company that can help further my career. This experience here at Cyberninjaz has awakened a love of teaching within me and although I don’t wish to teach younger students (elementary material is kind of boring), I think that maybe in the future being a college professor might be something that I wish to do. However, this is just something new that I have realized about myself and I still have honestly no idea what I want to do in the future with my career. An insight that I learned about teaching in general based on my time at Cyberninjaz is that children and young people simply have unlimited energy and they can at times be extremely exhausting. Several of my coworkers had to deal with kids who had enough energy to power UMD and were very exhausted after the end of their shifts.

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Last modified: May 11th 2023