Volunteering: a Teaching and a Learning Experience

This past week I was given the opportunity to volunteer within the STEM field while also influencing the generations of the future. With a Professor of Physics and three other STEM scholars, I was able to go into the inner city of Columbus and reach kids. I was able to show them the possibility of a future changing the world and not staying stuck in a loop of borderline poverty and living paycheck to paycheck.

This game project was not only a learning process for the children, but for me as well. I haven’t had a class that dealt with circuitry or electricity specifically in a few years. The idea was understandable to me in the finished product example. It is simple; you touch one wire to the other wire and the light glows.

When it came to the time that I had to explain the project to first, second and third graders, there was plenty of me learning along with the children. The experience was eye opening for me to the needs of volunteers compared to the knowledge of the leader.

A good leader needs to make sure that everyone is on the same page. In this case that could have meant asking all the volunteers to come 15 minutes earlier to build the circuit themselves to have a foundation of understanding.

This opportunity was far from perfect and allowed me the opportunity to stop, breathe, and go with the flow. I also realized the importance and clarity of having a plan written out with all the logistics, actions and notes from the leader. The everyone else can follow this and make sure everything goes to plan. I also realized the importance of a solid back up plan.

We had a powerpoint presentation for everyone to follow step by step through the project. It had pictures and added another level of understanding of the project for the kids and the volunteers. Unfortunately this tool was not cooperating, the projector would not work. The STEM students finally just started looking at the laptop for the instructions. This was a great plan to make sure that the kids were on track, but it pulled the volunteer’s attention from the children when they need supervision.

A solution to this problem in the project could be giving each volunteer a printout of the instructions that they could follow while staying right at the side of the children.

Over all, I truly enjoyed this volunteer experience. If I go again with this group I plan to be better prepared and ready for a action packed, eventful evening with many kids.

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