Thanks for sticking with us until the end, readers!
These past two weeks have been full of tying up loose ends, and prepping for the future of this project.
We had our final couple of visits with Lorelei and the kids at Bayside Middle School. We’ve been able to see the platform used in the classroom for 3 weeks now, and with the help of the students, we’ve been squashing all of the major bugs that were missed before the first deployment of the website. Working with middle school aged kids has been an asset during this process since they will never hold back when telling you the truth. With the codebase ready for handoff, the rest of our time was spent ironing out our Confluence page and our conference presentation.
This project was the first time most of our team members have had to consider the future of a codebase, so writing robust documentation was a new challenge. With that being said, our end result is pretty in-depth, and will definitely give the next team a good jumping off point for their iteration. This documentation focused on things like how to set up and run the project, what each feature is, and why was that feature added. We’re happy that we have the chance to support the next team a bit through making this Confluence page.
After looking forward by making our documentation, we got to look back on the semester by prepping our presentation for the INSPIRE conference. The presentation went through a lot of iterations and rewrites, but thanks to the honest feedback from the other INSPIRE groups, we’ve landed on one that we’re pretty proud of. This process really let us reflect on what we’ve accomplished this semester, and think about the people that helped get us there.
Most importantly, did we see any increase in engagement and excitement in the students after integrating the website into SENĆOŦEN class? Well, we’re really happy to say that we did. In the past few weeks, we’ve seen students work together to solve word search puzzles, draw pictures to add to their points of interest, and even procrastinate class work by playing games on the website. These visits have really reminded us why we pulled the late nights and early mornings.
This project has really shown the importance of community engaged learning. Our team came in with the technical knowledge to add-on to this website, but didn’t have the educational background to have gotten it done alone. We’ve been able to learn for teachers, linguists, speech pathologists, and kids. Everyone couldn’t have been more passionate about helping out and contributing to this project, and we got so much out of learning from such a diverse network of people.
That’s gonna be it for this iteration of BridgingRoots. It’s been so cool building off of the amazing website the Tuk team made.
To the next BridgingRoots team, good luck, we’re so excited to see where it goes next.