2021-08-26: ODU Teacher Professional Development Workshop

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The ODU Teacher Professional Development Workshop was a 3-day program conducted from August 2th - August 4th at the Open Research Lab (OR Lab) of the E&CS Building of ODU. It was funded by the Virginia Space Grant Consortium, and was conducted by Dr. Sampath Jayarathna in collaboration with Dr. Stacie Ringleb and Dr. Robert Ash at ODU. The goal of this workshop was to allow secondary-school teachers in the Hampton roads area to learn a) coding in Python, b) basics of the engineering design process, and c) programming with drones (specifically, DJI Tello). Teachers from 4 schools in Norfolk (Academy for Discovery, Blair Middle School, Crossroads School, Lake Taylor School, and Norview High School), 3 schools in Virginia Beach (Bayside High School, Landstown High School, and Old Donation School), and 2 schools in Chesapeake (Grassfield High School and Great Bridge Middle School) participated in this workshop. These teachers were provided free lunch and refreshments, and awarded a certificate and a $150 compensation for participation.

Day 1 - Aug 02, 2021

The program began with Dr. Sampath welcoming the teachers and introducing them to the workshop. Next, Dr. Sampath introduced the teachers to Google Colab (Colaboratory). It is a free Jupyter notebook cloud service that requires no setup and runs on a Web browser. It supports writing and executing code, saving and sharing results, and utilizing GPU computing resources, free of charge. Dr. Sampath used Google Colab to conduct the afternoon session on programming in Python.

The afternoon session of the day was an introduction to basic and advanced concepts in Python. Here, the teachers learned about basic data types (e.g., int, float), data structures (e.g., list, dict), functions, and selection control structures (e.g., if, else) in Python. Each concept learned was followed by in-class activities that focused on solving problems with the newly-learned concepts.

Day 2 - Aug 03, 2021

The second day of the workshop began with an introduction to the engineering design process and its methodologies. Here, Dr. Stacy Ringleb and Dr. Robert Ash explained the Engineering Design process to the teachers, and they had a short tour of the engineering facilities at ODU. Dr. Mary Sandy, the Director of the Virginia Space Grant Commission, was also present during this session to observe the workshop activities.

During the afternoon session, Dr. Sampath explained repetition control structures (e.g., while, for) in Python to the teachers. Similar to Day 1, these concepts were demonstrated through Google Colab, and the teachers participated in in-class activities to test their knowledge.

Day 3 - Aug 04, 2021

The third (and last) day of the workshop began with Dr. Gail Dodge, the Dean of ODU College of Sciences discussing opportunities for education, research, and collaboration at ODU. Following this, Dr. Sampath explained the basics of Python libraries using Anaconda and Spyder IDE. The teachers learned how these libraries are used for Data Analysis, Inference, and Visualization. The morning session ended with Gavindya, Bhanuka, and I (Yasith) demonstrating Eye Tracking, EEG, and Health Sensing equipment at our lab to the teachers. Here, we discussed some applications that these devices facilitate, and the types of research that we conduct at NIRDS Lab using them.

The afternoon session began with an invited talk (via Zoom) by Dr. Javier Puig-Navarro from NASA Langley. Here, Dr. Javier discussed the types of research that they conduct at NASA Langley, and the internship, volunteering, and career opportunities available at NASA. Following this, Ibrokhim explained the fundamentals of Drone Programming to the teachers, and demonstrated, with illustrations, how to program the DJI Tello Drone for movement and object tracking.

Final Thoughts

The ODU Teacher Professional Development Workshop was a great opportunity for secondary-school teachers in the Hampton roads area to learn programming. Through this workshop, they gained first-hand experience on basic and advanced programming concepts in Python, and how they are applied in areas such as Data Analysis. The presentations and invited talks provided context to different opportunities available in these areas. Overall, the feedback from the teachers were positive, and we would like to thank the VSGC Innovative Project Grants Program for their generous support in funding this workshop.

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