WISE Steps to Success a Big Success

Last Wednesday CU-WISE held a professional development event called WISE Steps to Success for a second year.  It's one of our flagship events, and was designed to give women in science and engineering the networking, negotiation, and confidence skills we aren't taught in class.

From the event description:

There's more to success than just passing your courses. There are a lot of skills to be learned outside of the classroom that greatly contribute to your future. And the earlier you start learning them, the earlier you can reach your goals.

Carleton's WISE, IEEE WIE, and Career Services have joined forces to give you the career building essentials and help you stand out. Whether you are actively looking for a job or not, this is an event you don't want to miss. This year we have also teamed up with local organization Dress for Success.

The event is free for Carleton's women in sciences and engineering, and will include a light dinner and dessert. You will hear from experts on networking, the importance of making a great first impression, dressing for success, confidence building, and negotiation skills. You will also have the opportunity to speak to mentors from academia and industry, to meet other students in your field, and to practice your skills.

This event was a huge success.  We had great attendance by both Carleton students and industry and academic mentors.  We saw a lot of networking happening during the breaks between talks, and the three speakers were amazing.



Best of all, I didn't even have to organize the event - four amazing Executives and Officers did it all! I got to play event photographer instead. ;)  You can see more photos from the event on Flickr.

The Speakers

Moyra McDill, a professor in engineering at Carleton, spoke about her experiences being the first woman to graduate with a degree from Mechanical Engineering at Carleton.  She told us about the "life rocks" philosophy.  She started with an empty measuring cup and added large rocks representing the most important things in her life, like family.  She then added smaller rocks into the spaces, sand in the remaining spaces, and water after all of that.  The point was that it's amazing how much you can fit into your life; just start with the big rocks, because you can't put those in after the sand/water/small stuff is already in there.



Next up was Andrew Moizer with an enthusiastic message about self-confidence and some tips on negotiation.  He encouraged everyone to step out of their comfort zone often.  I personally enjoyed his story very much, as he went from a big-wig in high tech to an entrepreneur with his own cattle farm. Talk about outside the comfort zone! What's really cool is his farm and cafe are in a small town my family and I visit frequently (it's on the other side of us from Ottawa).  I'm looking forward to visiting his and his wife's cafe soon.



Finally, by chance, a friend of mine was our last speaker.  Louise Grace came on behalf of Dress for Success Ottawa, whose mission is "to promote the economic independence of disadvantaged women by providing professional attire, a network of support and the career development tools to help women thrive in work and in life."  She told us about what Dress for Success does and then gave us tips on making the best first impression possible.  Her fashion advice was practical and reasonable, which I always appreciate, being someone who isn't all that into clothes.  I will always remember to check my shoes for salt stains before an important meeting or interview now thanks to Louise. ;)

Powerpointless Workshops

Today I put on a workshop for my fellow TA Mentors on Powerpointless Workshops.  While I don't think that using slides is totally evil, it's definitely the case that many people abuse them.  As Matt Might recently said in the context of academic talks:

PowerPoint has kneecapped public speaking.  People no longer "deliver a speech"; they "present slides." 

To me this represents an unfortunate state of affairs.


powerpoint as a comic by Austin Kleon

To get the workshop started, I asked what the participants usually wanted to get out of workshops they attend.  The consensus (other than the potential for free food) was pretty similar to what I wrote down ahead of time: I want to figure out some new technique or strategy that I can apply in my own work, and I want to somehow experience concretely.  In other words, I don't want to just be told or shown.

Based on this, we discussed some of the interesting activities that we've seen in workshops that help accomplish this.  This point was to ask after brainstorming how many of these things actually needed PowerPoint to be done well.  I was expecting a mix, but to my delight all the examples given fit with my alterior motive.

From there, I talked about some workshops I had done in the past and how they went.  I passed out some of the handouts I has used, including for the workshop I did on Teaching CS Concepts.  Then I moved back into asking for ideas on activities we could do in our own workshops (this felt a little weird since the previous discussion already brought many ideas forward, but we did get more out of the second conversation, so it was worthwhile).

Some of the possibilities that came up:

• Classics like think-pair-share and group discussions
• Doing what you are teaching (such as actually grading something in a workshop about grading)
• Microteaching (see Teaching CS Concepts link above for an example)
• Starting with a pointed hook (we made up this term to mean that you can have an ice breaker activity or a hook into the talk, but it needs to pack a punch and have a clear point)
• Write down scenarios or questions on a sheet of paper, cut them up, and give them to groups to discuss; later, present findings to group and discuss
• Role playing, case studies
• Games and simulations (especially good for seeing abstract ideas in action)
• Scavenger hunt (suggested for a mentor who has to present resources available to lab TA's)
• Creating lists of options, ranking them in terms of amount of effort required, and noting resulting benefit (you can often get good discussion as to why people chose different rankings)
• Incorporating videos, interactive applets, etc

One of the key points was to find ways to guide the students into learning what you want them to learn, rather than just tell them.

A few general tips that came up:

• Write an agenda on the board.
• Use some kind of visual aid, be it a handout, writing on the board, or whatever.
• Consider the introverts by providing them with opportunities to speak to others in smaller groups (i.e. avoid discussion-only workshops).
• Determine your key points, then repeat them in your examples and discussions, and even be explicit at some point.
• Be careful about inserting group activities for the sake of it - always know why you are doing it and why you are doing it at that point in time.
• There's no need to spell everything out up front, but do try to tie activities back to the main point after they are done.
• Walk around to groups as they work.  Be friendly so they see you as a peer instead of something checking up on them.

Have any other ideas for things to do during a Powerpointless workshop? Any other tips? I'm sure I missed some!

QR Code Story Adventures

A QR code is 2D bar code that was standardized well enough that free decoders are readily available for computers and smart phones.  You can encode about 3 KB of data according to Wikipedia, and this data can simply be text.  The most common use seems to be to encode web site addresses that will be loaded in a browser automatically after the QR code is decoded.  Because it's so easy to generate your own codes, just about anyone can set up their own scavenger hunt by hiding a bunch of custom codes locally and simply requiring players to write down what the codes say.


giaLLLo QR CODE ?G!question by giaLLLO!

By adding just a little more structure to this concept, you could orchestrate stories that enforce finding QR codes in a particular order.  The Hyperlab at Carleton has done a lot of research on writing narratives appropriate for this kind of scenario.  A GPS-based system called Whereigo facilitates the creation of stories and games that are tied to location.  Combining these two ideas would allow for finer grained placement of interesting story pieces than is possible with GPS alone.

I'm currently working on an iPhone app prototype for QR-based stories.  If it goes well, I am thinking about creating an authoring tool to make it easy for everyday users to create their stories, then polishing and marketing the app.

Teach Me How to Research

How many of you were formally taught how to research? I'm guessing that for many of you, like me, there was never a class or workshop available to show you how it's done.  I wish there was.


Who Knows What You'll Find When You Ask Questions by [F]oxymoron

If I had ever known I even might go to grad school, I would have tried to learn more about research before I even got here.  I could have done a summer research internship with a professor in our faculty.  I could have tried to make my honours project a little more research oriented.

When I started my Masters, I had no idea what "real" research was.  Some of my courses tried to show us, but I usually ended up doing implementation-based projects instead of attempting to answer any interesting questions.  I learned a bit from my supervisors, but we never explicitly talked about how things are done, so even then I was kind of just guessing.

Something I think would help me - and I'm sure many others - is an optional class or workshop series on how research is done in our field.  What exactly constitutes a 'contribution,' and how do you know if you've got one? What do theory-oriented researchers do? How are experiments usually run? What are the different kinds of papers that we could write, and how would an algorithms theory paper differ from, say, an experimental paper in graphics? It would be great to get specific to our areas, too, because even if I'm not an algorithms theorist, I think it would be very useful to see the big picture by knowing how various computer scientists work.

Does your school have a course or workshops on how to research? How well does it work? If you have a good model I'd love to hear about it, and maybe I can suggest doing something similar at Carleton.

Sneaking Computer Science Into Physics

I have been trying to convince local participants in the Let's Talk Science program that I can connect almost any of their course material to computer science.  I would like more teachers to request computer science activities through the program.  It's not an easy task, because the assumption is that only computer science classes would benefit from computer science activities.

Yesterday, I did an activity for a grade ten science class that recently finished their physics unit on optics.  (I only had half a class this time, but could have easily spent an entire class on the activity by adding some more hands on stuff.)  I started things off by discussing the difference between a bitmap and a vector graphic.  Once the students understood this, I asked them what they thought 3D graphics would be made with, and they guessed vector.

We talked a bit about how objects would be described mathematically in 3D space, and how you could wrap a bitmap around vector-based objects to texture them.  We looked at how to take a 3D object and represent it as a 2D object by making shadows onto the projector's screen.  I explained that this was called projection.  I quickly reviewed the geometry rules they had learned for lenses, and showed how it worked for an even simpler case: the pinhole camera.

I told them how film cameras worked (only a few even remembered having one!). I asked them what they thought was different for digital cameras.  What was the equivalent of the film? They guessed the screen, the memory card, and so on, but didn't guess that there was a sensor that acted like film.

After discussing the sensor, we did the CS Unplugged activity on image representation to get a feel for how computers can store image information.

And just like that, I got to teach them computer science in the disguise of learning physics. Hurrah! :D

When I do get the opportunity to do computer science activities (either for Let's Talk Science or other outreach), I generally find that the students have a real sense of accomplishment after they (inevitably) grasp the concepts.  Add that to the overall benefit of understanding even a bit about how computers - such an integral part of our lives today - work, and I think you have a compelling reason to invite a computer scientist to any high school classroom.

If you're interested in how you might be able to connect computer science activities to other high school subject areas, check out this document I put together a few years ago for ideas.