YSP Spring 2020 Recap and Overview
Originally Published April 1, 2020
This time last year, our staff supported our partner Los Angeles Unified School District teachers with their district-wide strike. This year we had to cancel on-site programming early due to the devastating COVID-19 (aka “coronavirus”) pandemic that has been plaguing our planet. Due to proactive and preventative protocols established by the university, the state and the nation, LAUSD closed all schools and both USC and LAUSD educational programming was moved on-line mid-March.
Mr. Hinkel and his fifth-grade students at Weemes admiring and sciencing with their new AR Sandbox
With all the changes, our scheduled Drone Workshop at Foshay was cancelled as well as professional development workshops for teachers scheduled for March and April. We are a strong community with fierce advocates for our students and teachers and I know that we will all get through this together. YSP TA’s were assigned remote work, such as creating instructional videos of our content, creating blogs about their experiences in the community and putting together research projects about the data we collect, all of which will continue to benefit our program and its constituents. We even had our last staff meeting virtually through Zoom to remain connected.
We are happy to share some positive updates from earlier in the semester. We received a Centennial grant from the American Geophysical Union (AGU) to cover the cost of installing an Augmented Reality Sandbox at each of our partner schools. Deezmaker’s Diego Porqueras was the mastermind behind the design. We were able to install two sandboxes at the start of the semester, and will continue to install the rest in the fall 2020 semester
Our partnership between the Los Angeles Mayor’s Office’s Women in STEM Los Angeles (WiSTEMLA) Initiative and the robotics company Ozobot has continued to blossom. Ozobot generously donated 85 Educator Entry kits for each one of our teachers so that we can increase their access to high quality robotics education opportunities. Some of our own staff even created lesson plan content that will be featured on Ozobot’s website!
Mrs. Soojin Busch, a fourth-grade teacher at 32nd Street Elementary School receiving her Ozobot from her fourth grade YSP TA Rita Barakat
The JEP STEM Programs are hoping that everyone is well and safe. We’d like to thank our funders: Good Neighbors Campaign, the Winn Family, Raytheon, and AIAA, for their support and partnership, but we do emphasize that current and new support and partnerships will be necessary moving forward.