This past summer, Aryan Pandey and I had the opportunity to work with the Boston Design Academy (BDA) to design, develop and teach a course about reducing food insecurity to high school students in the Greater Boston Area. Our journey with BDA started in March of 2021, when Andrew Singleton reached out to the both of us about an opportunity to work here for the summer. Andrew introduced us to Nona Cheeks, the program coordinator, and Shayna Holloway, the lead instructor of the team that we would end up working in. 

The BDA team gave us a glimpse into the “EAT (Elevating Agricultural Technology)” program and their goal for the summer - incorporate technology into a course about food insecurity and showcase how technology can be effectively used to combat food insecurity in an 8-week long course for high-school students. This meeting left us intrigued and excited about the EAT program. Aryan and I both have backgrounds in computer science and technology, so we were really excited at the challenge of breaking down technical concepts into digestible chunks for students and teaching them how to use these tools to make positive social change. We told Andrew that we would love to be a part of this BDA program and thus began on our journey to EAT.

The teaching team ended up consisting of 5 people: lead instructor Shayna Holloway, Daylin Aguasvivas, Rose Kitz, Aryan Pandey, and me (James Lai). Aryan and I went into this program with 3 clear objectives in our minds: communication, leadership and inspiration. We wanted to be able to communicate to the students about the need for sustainable food sources and their role in it. We wanted to constructively lead these sessions and have an active role in fostering discussion and ideas among the students. Finally, we also wanted to inspire the students to do more than the bare minimum as required by the program and think about the ways that they could apply the skills they learned from this program to other parts of their life. While Aryan had a little bit of teaching experience coming into the program, I had never taught before so the idea of having such a significant role in the education of these kids was a little daunting at first. To provide structure to the program and make the planning process more manageable, we broke down the summer into 3 phases: research, development and teaching. 

The first phase was research, where we as the teaching team compiled all the different sources of information we could find on food insecurity and technology and met up for regular meetings to discuss our findings. We also took part in a lot of personal development during this phase: we participated in a week-long workshop led by Tufts’ human factors professor James Intrilligator, which focused on design thinking and taught us how we can structure a course efficiently while being mindful of who our audience is (high schoolers in Boston). We also took training courses in TinkerCAD, Fusion360, and various other software and tools that we would be later incorporating into our course. 

The second phase was development, where we referenced all the research materials we had compiled and developed a holistic 8 week lesson plan for the students with accompanying slides, group activities and individual assignments/reflections. We referenced techniques shown to us by Prof. Intrilligator and tried to make our lesson plan and teaching style as interactive and engaging as possible. We were mindful of the students’ varying levels of background knowledge and designed the lessons to be simple enough as to not be overwhelming for students with no prior experience with the technology but still challenging enough for the students who were more familiar and comfortable with the topics coming into the program.

The third phase was teaching and it was definitely our favorite part of the summer! The program for the students was broken down into 3 modules, where each module would focus on a large overarching theme or activity.

• The first module spanned 3 weeks, in which we introduced the students to the entire program, had them learn about the situations in which food deserts arise, and how indoor gardening techniques can bring food supply into regions where grocery stores are scarce. This module covered all the background information relating to why it was important that we care about food insecurity.
• The second module was designed with technology in mind. Here, we recapped how technology arose, what needs it solves, and prompted students to think about how technology will continue to transform to solve new problems. Then, we delved into specific technologies. To name a few, we explored Tinkercad, Micro:bits, arduinos, and general circuitry. This module lasted around 2 weeks, and provided the technical foundation for students to help them think about how they can tackle the challenges of food insecurity with the resources that they have.
• The last module lasted for roughly 3 weeks and it was entirely focused on building the final prototype that each student would have to come up with. The students had been mailed a standard set of supplies that they could use to build their own technological indoor gardening device, and it was up to them on how they wanted to design it. We guided them throughout this process as any other teaching assistant would: debugging code Micro:bit code with them, helping them construct their circuits, and preparing them for their final presentations. But ultimately, this was their time to shine and the students managed to come up with a lot of cool and unique prototypes by the end of the program.

As mentioned before, Aryan and I have had limited experience with teaching, so the entire summer was a true test of how effectively we’d be able to communicate to our students. We had to find the perfect mix of professionalism and approachability in order to be someone that the students could reliably depend on without hesitation. Personally, one thing I’ve learned from this summer that’ll stick with me is that both students and instructors are two sides of the same coin. Both groups have the same goal - to facilitate learning while having fun in the process. It was really refreshing to see different styles and creativities. Teaching others is often the best way to learn yourself. We saw many bizarre solutions to questions we posed that ended up being just as efficient!

Putting the students aside, the team of instructors were a blast to work with. We were constantly communicating with each other to keep the team up to speed on any issues and we filled in the gaps in each others’ knowledge. Rose and Daylin had a strong, communicable grasp of circuitry and hardware, Aryan and I had more technical experience with coding, and Shayna helped keep both the team and the students organized and working towards the overarching goals week by week.

The EAT program was very well thought out, and we would like to think that the first summer was a big success! Aryan and I had a couple recommendations in mind that could be used to further improve the program in future iterations. Although we encouraged student feedback, we could have been more proactive, giving them direct opportunities for regular feedback either daily or weekly. Some students also mentioned that they thought the EAT program would be more programming focused, so it would be a nice addition to let them choose what specific technology or languages they would like to work with in the future.

Overall, Aryan and I reached our goal of hitting 210 hours over working with the Boston Design Academy, and each hour was definitely worth it. Our time was distributed over a variety of tasks, such as creating/drafting lesson plans, familiarizing ourselves with the relevant technologies, rehearsing our delivery, and undergoing professional development and design thinking training. The experience that we’ve gained, in turn, is irreplaceable. This summer turned out to be a very fulfilling Leadership-in-Action activity - it helped us significantly strengthen our leadership and communication skills and will serve as a solid foundation for us to further build upon in the future.