Old Collegian Shares Google Internship Experience

Posted on June 30, 2015 by Sam McNeill

Former student Claudia Pottinger (class of 2013) returned this week to share her experiences of being a Google Internee with Mr Phil Adams’ Year 13 Digital Technologies class. I was fortunate to be able to listen in on this session and record a few reflections.

Claudia attended St Andrew’s College for five years and during that time never studied programming or computer science, instead focusing on the ‘two Science, two Maths and English’ approach. When she started at Auckland University it was to studying for a degree in Engineering and a BA in Logic and Computation. It was in Computer Science 101 that she was introduced to the language of Python – something that was going to prove very helpful when it came to apply for the Google Internship.

Having seen a link online offering Google Internships for “under-represented groups in the technology industry”, Claudia applied, sending off a CV. She was eventually contacted and went through two different phone interviews to see her suitability for this role before being hired for the summer of late November 2014 through to February 2015.

MAIN ROLE AT GOOGLE:

The project Claudia was assigned to for her internship was to work in the Network Operations Corp and she worked on creating visualisation tools showing availability, packet loss and latency between Google offices and data centres. Her primary role was to retrieve this data from existing systems in place at Google, organise it into a useful format and then another internee helped to present this with web coding in HTML and JavaScript.

Licensed under Creative Commons

Google allowed time for the interns to become familiar with the environment and understand how work happens within Google (took about 3 weeks) and the project was completed before the end of the 12 week internship. In responding to questions from students in the room, Claudia noted:

The work environment was terrific – she was provided her own desktop (running a Google customised version of Ubuntu) and was also given a ChromeBook so she could work away from her desk.
There was flexibility in terms of what application she coded in e.g. she could use eMacs if she liked or other software platforms if she preferred.
Security was very tight – she was given an ID badge to enter/exit doors and also USB devices to authenticate onto computers.
The security around customer information was very tight, however she could browse code from different projects if she wanted to.

GOOGLE LIFE – THE PERKS!

The students at St Andrew’s were amazed to hear of all the perks Google employees had access to and even Claudia was impressed that as an internee she was also given full access to these. These included:

Gaming rooms – a wide range of consoles from various versions of Playstations, X-Boxes, Pinball Machines and even an old Nintendo 64!
Micro Kitchens – located usually no less than 50metres away from any workspace, these had snacks, candy and other food and drinks.
Four different restaurants each with unique menus and a smoothie bar
Rock climbing wall, pool tables, table tennis tables etc for recreation.

All of this was provided free for the employees and interns.

Click the image to go through to a gallery of photos from the Sydney Google offices.

A typical day for Claudia was described as walking 40minutes to work from the provided accommodation, having breakfast and grabbing a smoothie for her desk before signing into work and checking her emails and then getting down to coding.

Whilst not required, Google encouraged the various teams to lunch together regularly, after which she might relax in one of the games rooms and then return to code till around 6pm. One of the four restaurants was open for dinner for staff.

In response to a question on whether there was close monitoring of work hours / effort, Claudia said that provided staff were delivering the outcomes required for their projects in the time frames set there was no questions asked about long lunches or breaks to play games etc.

KEY MESSAGES FOR STUDENTS:

Throughout the internship there was a lot to learn and some of the key messages that were passed on to current students at St Andrew’s College included:

Other people must be able to read your code – keep it clear, clean and use lots of comments in your code.
- All code she produced had to be signed off by a colleague before it could be committed and for this to be accepted the code had to be readable.
Use the Coding Style Guides provided by Google to assist with this
Document what you’re coding about as well – be as clear as possible.
When applying for internships, include information on your interests and involvement in life outside of just programming.
- Mr Adams reinforced this as well after his visit to Google in Mountain View and New York last year. He mentioned that so many of the applicants are simply brilliant academically that one way to stand out is to show what you’re passionate about and involved in outside of work.

CONCLUSION:

It was great to have an Old Collegian return to share with our students about the possibilities of internships and how to go about applying. To round out her experience, Claudia is likely to return to Google in Sydney at the end of 2015, but is also considering internships at alternative companies such as Microsoft.

This experience has also helped to shape her future career ambitions, focusing in on possible jobs in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. Her final message to the students was that you don’t need to have everything decided right now and that by being a life long learner you can change direction within your degree and even into your career.

Guest Post: Digital Disruption – A Millennial’s Perspective

Posted on June 24, 2015 by Sam McNeill

This guest post first appeared on iStart – Technology in Business (please click through to read the preface by Ben Kepes) and features an insightful summary by Year 10 student Yonni Kepes on the impact of technology in society today.

Yonni Kepes

“As the world goes through a digital transformation and disruption, we must remember what will actually be changing. For me digital transformation means changing from an old manual way of doing things to a new system that uses technology to do business in new ways. Jobs will be replaced by new, different applications of technology and it will be my generation that will be filling many of these posts.

“I think the biggest challenge for us will be understanding the extent of the transformation. For example, we weren’t around when taxis were one of the main types of transport for hire, so we never saw the industry fully function with no Uber to challenge it. And although we are in this transformation we will never see the end result – it is part of an unprecedented, continual and rapid change. I believe that makes it a lot harder for my generation to understand the changes and to know where they should look for and find good jobs which are secure. A good company attracts good employees to enjoyable jobs. Employees who are flexible and like learning new skills, and employers that support them are what make a good place to work. If my generation wants to still be employed in jobs like these, then we need to learn these new technology-based skills and use them as best we can. It is also important that customers get to have a say when looking at business. Since my generation is the future consumer, we can offer great advice that will help shape the future of businesses.

“I also believe that as we slowly transition in to a digital world of some sort we will have our lives changed a lot by digital innovation. People now have too many “devices” in their homes, with the average number per person at nearly five. It’s a worry that more household items will be swapped for more devices with some sort of transmitter in them. The reason for my concern is because the devices will ‘take over’ people’s lives. Although having more devices per person is, in my opinion, a bad thing, they do have their benefits. These devices can now stay in contact with their owners and tell them, for example, when dinner is ready, what’s happening with the washing, or the temperature of the bath; little things in isolation, but with the potential to completely change our lives when combined. If this is happening now, then what will be happening in 20 years’ time?

“I think the biggest challenge for us will be understanding the extent of the transformation.”
Yonni Keeps, 15-year-old millennial

“It’s interesting that my generation is so fixated on what sort of phone we have but we don’t even stop to consider what digital disruption is doing to some businesses and what this could mean in terms of the way we live our lives. I believe that when my generation does see what digital disruption is doing they will simply pull a weird face, as they don’t understand it or what it is doing to the world since we will be viewing it from inside the middle of the transition. Then again, digital disruption will offer opportunities for us to look at companies and say ‘I think I can do better than them’. From there we will be able to build businesses taking advantage of other people’s lack of technological understanding. This will help to build a better system for future business.

Yonni & his father Ben Kepes who chaired the conference in Melbourne on Digital Disruption

“I believe that once my generation actually sees what is transforming then this world could turn in to a place where lots of different concepts will be used to make our life a lot easier.

“I’m very excited as this will offer many new opportunities which weren’t afforded to the generation before. I believe that with a good mindset my generation can use digital disruption to our advantage and make the world a much better place.”

Sharing Science Over Skype

Posted on June 24, 2015 by Sam McNeill

Yesterday Mr Bevan Jones’ Year 9 Science class demonstrated a science experiment with Mr Bradley Shaw’s Year 8 class. The unique aspect of this was that it was shared entirely over Skype – the two classes were not physically in the same room.

Talking this over with Mr Tom Adams, the College eLearning Integrator, we initially puzzled as to why this was done in this way. However, we concluded that had both classes been in the same room, inevitably many would not have been able to see the science experiment easily since there would have been over 50 students from Year 8 & 9 crowding around to watch. Additionally, by doing it over Skype, it removed the 5minute walk between the Preparatory and Secondary Schools.

Unfortunately, whilst the clarity of the video was excellent, the audio on this occasion was not so good, something that we will iron out in future. St Andrew’s College does have a Middle Years programme that aims at increasing the connectedness of students in Years 7-10 as they transition from the Preparatory School into the Secondary School, and joint science classes like this help support that.

Guest Post: Collaborative Composition In Music

Posted on June 16, 2015 by Sam McNeill

This guest post today comes from Mr Duncan Ferguson, Head of Department of Music here at St Andrew’s College. Previous posts have featured his work integrating technology in his practice that you can read here and here. Today’s post looks at his Project Based Learning (PBL) with his Year 10 Music Options class. You can read the original blog post here.

Over the last five weeks I’ve been trying a new way of running collaborative composition in my year 10 Option Music class.

This year I’ve been blessed to have a large class of highly motivated and talented students, so they were the perfect class to take a risk and jump into what is for me a new way of teaching composition.

The basic summary of what we did is that I divided the class into five groups. In the first week each group had to start writing and recording a song (in a rough demo format). In the 2nd week the groups swapped songs and continued on with what another group had started the previous week. We did this for five weeks so that in the end, every group had been involved in the composition process on each of the five songs.

Initially the students were very nervous about this process as I’d done very little in terms of how to actually write songs. However, that didn’t worry me as within each group of five members I knew that there were people with various strengths that when combined would make the process go smoothly.

Prior to this we had done a little work on what makes a good chord progression (mainly analysing four chord songs) and an effective melody but within the context of their own personal compositions, which they recorded/sequenced in either Garageband or Studio One Free. It wasn’t much, but it proved to be enough to get the students on the way with the process. What was critical to the process though (which I didn’t realise until we got a few weeks into the process) was that a strong knowledge of how to use technology and specifically MIDI keyboards/guitars with software sequencers made all the difference to the success of students being able to pass on their work to the next group (only a few students in the class had strong notation/theory skills so technology bridged the gap very effectively).

Here is a little video where I show one of the songs and how each group contributed towards it week by week:

And here some of the songs created by the students (please keep in mind that these are only supposed to be at ‘demo’ quality… we still intend to record them properly at a later date):

This whole process has been an incredibly empowering experience for the students and is a great demonstration of the high end of the SAMR model:

Software like Garageband and Studio One has enabled students to achieved a huge amount in a very short time and made it possible for this separate group collaborative thing to happen. Students that recorded audio onto iPhones or wrote down music with traditional notation were no where near as effective in the sharing of their music with others. By far the best way for this process to succeed was for students to compose using MIDI for the instruments and microphones/audio for the vocals… all along with a click so the music could be easily edited and rearranged by different groups.

Here are a couple of short videos watching students in action as they were creating their songs:

For other teachers who are wanting to run this sort of unit I’ve found that the following will make the process go very well:

Ensure that each group has at least one person who plays the following instruments: piano, guitar, drums, voice. Often drummers don’t have a huge amount to do in the first week or two but as the weeks went by I discovered they were increasingly taking charge of the projects… running the technology (i.e. the computer DAW/sequencer)… which was critical when it came to restructuring ideas previous groups had come up with into coherent song structure of intros, verses, choruses, etc
Try and have a computer with a MIDI keyboard and a microphone setup in each room. If you are using student laptops instead make sure you have a dedicated USB drive that holds the files that they work off… minimise copying of files between computers. We ended up a losing a complete work from one room that students were working in as they mistakingly copied the wrong files then deleted the proper one. The most successful songs were those that came out of rooms that had dedicated computers that students used each week.
Use the note pad facilities of your DAW (like Garageband or Logic) for writing down chord progressions, lyrics, ideas, etc Don’t have things on scraps of paper as they may get lost. Keeping everything with the DAW file is an elegant solution for keeping everything in the same place.
Don’t record piano/guitar ideas as audio… try to record them as MIDI. This will enable successive groups to edit what was recorded. If it’s audio, they’re stuck with it and are unable to improve upon it.

For me this process has been such an eye opener. The students surprised themselves with what they could come up with. The loved the process (they always arrived early from lunch so they could start as quickly as they could) and they grew so much as the weeks went by.

I will be making sure that this way of composing will be incorporated to NCEA composition at our school. It will grow the numbers of students taking music and will help to break down the perception that you must be an orchestral musician who has been learning since you’re seven years old to be able to succeed in NCEA (even after five years at my school I’m still trying to destroy this myth!).

But overall… it was a heck of a lot of fun. And that is what teaching and learning should be… shouldn’t it?

Getting Creative with Writing

Posted on June 5, 2015 by Tom Adams

This post is based around work done by Ms Tam Yuill Proctor. She has already blogged about this unit here. She has also created a Sway about it, which you can view here.

One of our aims, as an eLearning team, is to foster and supplement the intrinsic enthusiasm of many of our staff. We find this blog is a great way to publicise and celebrate the success that we see every day in our school.

One such staff member is Ms Tam Yuill Proctor. A previous post on this blog described her success with using Google Earth to explore film setting with her Year 10 English class. This activity was part of a wider unit exploring the importance of setting within English. In response to the great work her class produced in this activity, Ms Proctor approached me to talk through some ideas to continue this innovation-based learning with this class.

Example video showing a world created by a student to inspire their creative writing

With a continued focus on setting, the class was given a fairly stereotypical short story brief. Write a short story of approximately 600 words with the theme of Conflict. Each student must produce at least four drafts, make those drafts available to their peers for feedback and feedforward, and act on appropriate advice given. Nothing particularly groundbreaking here!

A scene created using the source engine of the game Counter-Strike

However, acting on inspiration gained from a keynote address given by Australian author Michael Pryor at the NZATE English Conference, Ms Yuill Proctor had students design the setting for their story before they wrote it. The period before the recent school holidays, the students were set the task of creating a virtually designed setting for their story. They were able to use any digital platform they wanted, and could spend as much time as they wanted, over the holidays, on the setting. The results were remarkable.

While a smaller number of students contacted Ms Proctor asking if they could work in ‘the real world instead’ the vast majority of the students stuck to the original brief. There was a wide variety of work produced, with settings constructed in Sketchup, Paint, Minecraft and the source engine of the game Counter-Strike.

Student’s setting made using Sketchup

Bringing the learning together

The final aspect of this task involved students recording a short video, or audio recording that would allow them to clearly the author’s purpose, specifically regarding the setting they had designed. The challenge we now faced was what is the best way to tie all this great work together in a way that was accessible for a larger audience. Our original idea was to use the augmented reality App Aurasma, which has been used with some success in the Preparatory School. Unfortunately it quickly became obvious that the use of this App, with this particular group, was going to be problematic as although the class all had their own laptops, not all had a compatible smartphone.

The obvious solution was to host students’ videos on You Tube and create the links with QR codes instead. This proved to be a great decision as all students were able to create and link their codes effectively and quickly. The other pleasing aspect of this success was that it further consolidated my belief that, in a classroom setting, it is usually much more effective to use an easy to use tool, that a more complicated substitute that may, in fact, have any tangible value added.

The 3D printer creating the Minecraft setting created by a student

With many students choosing to create their setting in Minecraft, Ms Yuill Proctor and I were really conscious that it might be difficult for the audience of the story to get a full appreciation of the complexity of a Minecraft setting design from a 1D picture. Resultantly we decided to print these designs on the school’s 3D printer. The knowledge of Joshua Harrison, a member of the IT team, was instrumental at this stage, and I acknowledge his important contribution.

Printed Example of a 3D setting

Reflections on a job well done

I was particularly pleased with the fact that this, very successful, unit is a great example of a teacher challenging herself, and her students, with an activity that is clearly modification on the SAMR scale.

Ms Yuill Proctor was also very pleased with the results of the unit; especially the fact that it “fully integrated all aspects of the English Curriculum.” The creating meaning and the making meaning Curriculum Strands were both clearly addressed and the structured nature of the unit allowed student agency to come to the fore.

Example of Student Work

The following story is based around a setting created in the source engine of the game Counter-Strike. Use the QR code to see a video of the setting, or click here!

Continue reading →

Guest Post: Our Coding Journey – The Beginnings

Posted on June 4, 2015 by Sam McNeill

This guest post comes from Miss Briony Marks who has guest posted here before with her work in maths. Today it is her story of working with Year 7 students in our Preparatory School, introducing them to the basics of coding. You can see the original post here.

One of my goals for this year was to learn something (anything!) about the world of coding and how teaching coding in schools can benefit students.

January came and I started with trepidation and a sense of awe as I scoured the Internet looking for ideas and where to begin. I was utterly overwhelmed by the amount of information available. I want to share this journey with you in the hope that it will help others along their way!

I’ve been working with a Year 7 class who had no prior experience with coding. I’m hoping to survey and interview them about their experiences towards the end of this term.

Where we began:

I began with the students in the same place that I started as a teacher; looking for information on the benefits of coding and why we should be encouraging students to learn how to code.

I found myself reading guest articles by Chris Betcher (@betchaboy) on Splash ABC, “More than a game; why coding will help kids for life” was just what I was looking for.

I copied the article onto our OneNote Content Library and asked students to read and highlight key information.

The article was in our content library ready for students to copy across and annotate.

Students then worked in pairs to discuss the article, ultimately posting three reasons why we should code onto our Collaboration Space, this was a great exercise in using OneNote to work collaboratively and to share ideas as well as encouraging students to see the benefits in coding.

Our shared space (again experiencing a few syncing errors)

Students were able to identify benefits such as:

Kids should code because they would like to see what happens when you are doing something on the computer.

kids should code because it is a new experience for them.

kids should code because they need to know what do when they don’t know what to do.

Learning to think the computer way can help solve other problems, whether it be Maths or English.

To learn on different websites like Scratch, and without noticing, go through failure repetitively to find the solution.

Not just to develop understanding of coding, but to help students see the big opportunities open to them.

Other students identified being able to get jobs in the IT Industry as a key factor, being able to write your own apps, create websites or blogs.

Despite this shared knowledge the students were still asking me “what is code?” and “what does it mean?”. They had been told what the benefits of coding were without knowing what it really was (other than it was to do with computers!).

To tackle this question I used a PE lesson. I was still a little wary of where to begin with computers so was grateful for the opportunity to delay the inevitable!

I wanted to show them that coding was essentially a series of very specific commands so we set up obstacle courses. Armed with stacks of cones and hurdles and a box full of blindfolds we constructed two obstacle courses. Students had to come up with a list of commands to navigate a blindfolded partner through the maze. The blindfolded partner could not think or act for themselves. They had to be told exactly what to do.

The results were great – students were highly engaged and were frustrated when their sequence of commands weren’t interpreted as hoped! We had started to test and re-write our code and there wasn’t a computer in sight.

Even now as we make our projects in Scratch I remind the students of this experience and how important it is to have an eye on a goal and to write clear, specific instructions as to how to get there.

A great post from Miss Marks and we will certainly post updates about how the students are getting on with their programming challenge.

Student’s Sharing their Digital Citizenship Learning

Posted on June 3, 2015 by Tom Adams

An important part of the Year 10 pastoral programme at St Andrew’s College is Te Waka. This innovative programme involves students working in a small group with a mentor teacher as they focus on the journey into adulthood through a focus on resilience, respect and responsibility. This programme, introduced in 2014, has proven very successful with staff and students alike. You can read more about the programme here.

While the Te Waka programme has strong, common themes that all groups address, there is the opportunity for groups of students to spend time investigating issues that are of particular interest to them. One such group, led by their mentor Mrs Richards, wanted to investigate issues around digital citizenship. Having spent some weeks discussing the particulars of such issues, the group were keen to share their learning to a wider audience; through a website.

The great website 8 Te Waka students made about Digital Citizenship

The eight students in the group were randomly paired up, and each pair was assigned one of four topics; Digital Footprint, Cyber Bullying, Social Media and Texting. Each pair of students worked independently on their area of the website, with a little guidance from their mentor.

The aspect of this work that was particularly impressive was that the content of the site was entered, proofed, and published within two periods. What this success also indicates is that other staff, who may be thinking about the possibility of creating such a resource with their students, can be very confident that the learning curve is not too great for our students and that there are clear benefits for student learning.

Sharing the Learning Further

Year 10 Te Waka students sharing their learning with 8C

When shown the result of the learning, the College’s Director of IT Sam McNeill suggested sharing the website with a class in our Preparatory School. One of our great Year 8 Team, Mrs Preston, jumped at the chance and recently 5 of the Te Waka group presented their website to 8C. It was really pleasing to see students speaking about their learning, and be able to articulate their learning to a different audience and respond to their lines of questioning.

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Monthly Archives: June 2015