Running the Event

Registration

• Before registration opens, show any early students and parents where they can sit and wait. You can provide card games if there are frequently many children who are very early.

• When registration opens each student:

  • Gets checked in on Humanatix (or other sign up system your node is using)

  • Makes a name tag

  • Students say goodbye to their parents before the next point (unless student is very anxious or has a support plan that indicates their parent will stay with them).

  • Complete the streaming quiz and get a coloured sticker (if you are doing streaming quiz) 

  • Go to the Morning Games areas and play bingo/other arranged games  

• For students with support plans (or who are flagged by parents, tutors, or themselves as needing extra support during registration)

  • Connect with the Wellbeing Officer

  • Go over the plan for the student for the day (or create a plan)

  • Enact any parts of the plan that need to be done immediately

• During registration there are often parents or students with questions. As the event lead it’s important that your volunteers can find you to get help answering these questions, so try and stay in the main registration as much as you can. You can also keep an eye out for any confused or unsure looking parents or students and go up to them to give them a hand.

Welcome Address

We open the event in a whole group session with the following agenda:

• Welcome to GPN

• Welcome to Country

• Thank you to venue partner and sponsors

  • Possible sponsor Welcome Speech

  • Possible venue partner promotion 

• Hands up any new students and cheer

• Hands up any new tutors and cheer

• Event safety 

• Tutor introductions (using a format that is suitable for the number of tutors you have)

• Introduce Wellbeing and Safety Officers

• Split into classrooms (if you have more than one)

  • If you are using the streaming quiz

    • Explanation of splitting into classrooms and skit of staying with friends

    • Split into classrooms (starting with most advanced going to least advanced), sending each group as it is formed to their room with their tutors 

  • If you have 2 classrooms (no streaming quiz)

    • Explain how to stay with friends

    • Send students who have done programming to more advanced class with tutors for that room

    • Remaining students (and any friends they have kept) go to the beginner class with tutors for that room.

Morning Lab Session

In the rooms

• Students and tutors arrive in labs, students take a seat

• Room lead welcomes students

• More in depth tutor introduction

• Ice breaker activity

• Start of day survey

• Commence workshop content

  • Room coordinator gives first lecture

  • Students work on the first section(s) of workbooks, tutors provide assistance and approach students who look to be struggling. 

  • Repeat doing lecture and then workbook section throughout the morning. The next lecture should be given when the majority of students are ready for the next concept piece of the workbook, the Room Lead should be watching for this and let the next lecturer know when they see there will be a need for the lecturer soon. 

As an event lead

• Go around to every classroom to make sure that the number of students and tutors is correct in each room

  • Make sure that every student has a computer that is working

  • Make sure that there are enough tutors for the number of students (trying to get to the 1:3 ratio in every room) - keep in mind the tutors who are signed up to give lectures and try not to move them, or if you do then redo to the lecture allocations as needed

  • Try and make sure that students stay with their friends and in an appropriately leveled room while redistributing

• Make sure that every classroom has done their start of day survey 15 minutes after they have gotten into the room - remind them to do that if they’ve forgotten

• Once all the start of day surveys have been done, get the results and create the certificates with all the names of the students

• You may need to help the wellbeing officer figure out which rooms students with support plans have ended up in and help them brief the room leads of any extra needs their students may have

• As the students get started on the content they may discover some technical issue (e.g. pygame is not installed correctly) and you may need to help problem solve or swap to a backup solution (e.g. using an online IDE with pygame instead) and communicate this to every room lead so that they can continue with the content

• You can pack up some of the start-of-day stations like tutor greeting, checkin and streaming quiz

Lunch

• If you’ve ordered food to be delivered (e.g. pizza) then you will need to coordinate with the delivery (this might be done through a university partner). 

• Depending on how much food you have, you may need to pull some tutors out of the classrooms to help carry lunch into the building and to get lunch set up. This includes

  • Putting out or moving tables to create an orderly line to collect food 

  • Sorting food into categories (e.g. types of pizza or sandwiches) 

  • Setting out food, (if your node is getting large consider having multiple lanes, each lane should have the same food in the same order). 

    • Tip: Kids are picky eaters, put the more “complex” food at the start of your lanes so more adventurous kids will pick it up, put the simplest foods that more kids can/will eat at the end (particularly vegetarian foods, and simple foods like margarita or cheese pizzas). 

  • Separating special dietary requirement food so that it is saved for the people who need it 

  • Making sure that food is labelled with any allergens as necessary and general labels to identify different options (eg. Hawaiian, Chicken Supreme) 

  • Prepping food (e.g. breaking up loaves of garlic bread so that students don’t need to touch the whole thing to take some and don’t take a whole loaf to themselves)

  • Putting out napkins, cups and drinks if available 

  • Putting out hand sanitizer if available

• Once lunch is set up, go to each classroom and ask for anyone with dietary requirements (note: it’s helpful to list which dietary requirements you want to come first. E.g. if you have a lot of vegetarian pizzas you may only want vegan, gluten free, dairy free and halal students but not vegetarians to come at first). Send the dietary students and dietary tutors to the lunch area first so that they are guaranteed to get the food that’s set aside for them.

• Once the people with dietary requirements have had a chance to grab their food, let each classroom know that they can also go to the lunch room - make sure that they follow their room lead. 

• Depending on your computer setup and which project you are running, the students may need to be reminded to save their code or stop their computers from going to sleep/logging them out before they leave the classroom (by presenting the Welcome to GPN slide).

• Remind the students to bring their water bottles, and if the classrooms won’t be secured during lunch, encourage them to bring all their belongings. 

• Help manage the queue for the food and make sure that students are sitting and eating in appropriate places (e.g. they can’t eat anywhere unsupervised, and they may not be allowed to eat in the computer labs).

• Lunch can be a loud and chaotic time, so keep an eye out for overwhelmed students and make sure the wellbeing officer is aware of any issues.

• Lunch is a great time to check in with volunteers and room leads.

After Lunch Activities

(Optional - see Scaling Nodes)

Once lunch is over, you might go straight back to classrooms or do these extra activities based on your scale. If you’re doing these activities, gather all the students and volunteers into a room to explain what will happen next.

You can take this opportunity to say what the next terms topic and dates are and give a demo of what that project lookalike (i.e. a video of the end product of Beginners running).

Sponsor Talk

• If you have a sponsor after-lunch talk scheduled, make sure that you know who is giving the talk and say hi to them ahead of time. It might be good to show them where they will be giving the talk and if there is a microphone or projector for them to use, how they work ahead of time.

• If they have slides, make sure those are ready to go ahead of time

• Once it’s time for the after lunch talk, introduce the speaker and hand over to them

• After their talk, start a round of applause and thank them for their presentation

Computerless

• Computerless games can be led either by a node lead or can be delegated to another committee member. 

• Every computerless game is a bit different but generally you need to do the following:

  • Make sure that tutors who are going to be involved know what they need to do to prep or during the game (e.g. putting posters up, running a station).

  • Introduce the game and go through the slides explaining how to play and what to do.

  • Help students get into groups - might need to encourage shy students to join a group, or split up a large group of friends.

  • Get tutors to distribute the resources as required.

  • Encourage tutors to go up to the students and check on them.

  • Answer questions about how to play the game.

  • Make sure that prizes are being awarded correctly and fairly.

  • Oversee the game and make sure that people are playing correctly (or close enough), that they understand the rules, and most importantly, are having fun.

    • If you see that students (or tutors) are struggling with the game it may be worth getting on the microphone to explain any common misunderstandings.

    • If things are really not working out you can modify the game (eg. give extra hints) so students have a sense of achievement in the time that they have. 

• When you are approaching the end of the allocated time, give the students a warning (e.g. we have 5 minutes left, we have 2 minutes left etc)

  • If you are also running Mentor Hangz you will need to coordinate with the Mentor Hangz Lead about when to finish the game, so they don’t start a new rotation when you are returning to the classrooms.

• Once the time is up, give a recap of what the point of the game was (e.g. “I hope you all had fun learning about decision trees and can see how they are like XYZ parts of today's project!”) and send the students and tutors back to their classrooms.

• Depending on the game and the mess, you may want to keep one tutor from going to their classroom to help you tidy up the area that the game was played in (e.g. taking down posters, throwing out used paper).

Mentor Hangz

• After lunch, explain the choice between the computerless game and Mentor Hangz to the students.

• Ask the students in years 10+ to follow the Mentor Hangz lead to the Mentor Hangz area if they want to participate.

• Depending on how many older students turn up on the day and want to participate in Mentor Hangz, you may need to change who is allocated as a mentor on the fly - either increasing or decreasing. Try and keep in mind the allocation requirements (keeping sponsors and a diversity of experiences) when making these changes.

Afternoon Lab Session

• Some students may have gone home at lunch (via prior arrangement or organising with Node Lead/other leader during the event), so make sure that the classroom leads know if they should expect to be missing someone in their room.

• Sometimes volunteers also have to leave early and that often happens around lunch so you may need to redistribute some tutors for the afternoon session (hopefully room allocations have accounted for this, but on the day this may have changed).

• Organise the printed certificates into piles based on the room that those students are in so it’s easy to distribute them.

• Split any GPN stickers or other merchandise for the students into piles to go to each room. 

• Roughly an hour to half an hour before the end of the day, go to see each Room Lead to: each room to hand the Room Lead their allocation of:

  • Give them their classes certificates

  • Hand over GPN stickers/merch for students/tutors

    • Give them instructions (e.g. there are 3 sticker choices and each student gets one sticker)

  • Remind them to get the students started on the end of day survey.

• Parents typically start arriving up to half an hour early to pick up the students. You can greet them and show them where they can wait. If they’ve told you that they are doing an early pickup then follow that procedure, but otherwise ask them to wait for all the students to finish.

Event Close

• Once all the students have completed the end of day survey and it’s time for them to be picked up, the event leads will gather all the students and tutors to take a group photo - you can delegate a tutor to take the photo, but it’s important that the photo is taken on the phone of someone who has agreed to the correct policies <PUT WHICH POLICIES HERE> (note: this group photo can be taken at lunch time if the logistics are difficult. For example if there isn’t a space that is easy to take a photo in the pickup area)

• Thank the students for coming and get them to applaud their tutors and thank them for all their hard work. 

• Point out the public transport walking group area/tutors (if applicable).

• While the students are leaving you may have parents who have questions or want to comment on the day so it’s good to be accessible while the pickup is happening. You can also start the event pack down process by delegating the jobs to some experienced tutors.

• Sometimes students' parents are late or have forgotten what time to pick them up, so you may have some students who are hanging around for a while. If you notice a student who hasn’t been picked up yet, go up to them and ask them if they know when their parent is coming and follow the <insert procedure for late pickup>