Mentor Curriculum: Unit 1 (Junior)

Meeting Agenda Templates

Use these pre-made sample agendas to run your sessions with your students. These templates were developed to reflect the experience and division of student teams. Mentors are encouraged to adjust the agendas to meet the needs of your team. The agenda is designed to accommodate different meeting formats.

Choose the option that best fits your team.

⭐️ 2-Hour Meeting
Complete the full agenda during one 2-hour meeting.

🌱 Two 1-Hour Meetings
Divide the agenda between two 1-hour meetings. 

⚡️ 1-Hour Meeting Each Week
Use the 1-Hour Meeting markers to identify the activities to complete during each weekly 1-hour meeting. Complete the remaining activities between meetings as homework.

Week 1 Agenda Template

Unit 1

Table of Contents

OBJECTIVES FOR UNIT

Team

  • Build team camaraderie

💡Ideation

  • Understand types of problems based on the Sustainable Development Goals
  • Define communities they belong to
  • Brainstorm and list potential problems to solve in their communities
  • Learn how digital solutions and artificial intelligence can be used to solve problems

📱Coding

  • Learn what options there are for app builders to build their digital solution
  • Learn what an algorithm is and practice making one

BUILD YOUR AGENDA

Select one of the agenda templates and fill it in with the unit’s activities to organize what your team will cover in your meeting for the week. 

Any remaining activities should be completed by the team outside of the meeting or in future meetings.

1-hour meeting
2-hour meeting

OUTLINE OF ACTIVITIES FOR THE UNIT

Unit 1 has 9 activities, not all of them need to be done in your session together. Choose what you would like to accomplish together in a 1 -2 hour meeting. The team can work on the remaining activities separately. To learn how these activities help your team, review the Goals of the Activities. Note: We strongly recommend using App Inventor over Thunkable, as Thunkable may have additional restrictions for free accounts.

Can be done during the meeting

Can be done after the meeting

Activity

💡Identifying problems Activity 1: Understanding your Community (Part 1) worksheet (Page 1) helps to define team members’ communities, their demographics, and helps the team choose a particular community to focus on for their project.

💡Identifying problems Activity 2: Understanding your Community (Part 2) worksheet (Page 2) asks team members to take a field trip in their local community to observe and gather information.

💡Identifying problems Activity 3: Categorizing problems (Part 1) worksheet (Page 1) – practice categorizing problems according to UN SDGs. 

💡Identifying problems Activity 4: Brainstorming Problems worksheet (Page 2) Brainstorm different problem ideas based on previous learning of community issues and UN SDGs. 

💡Identifying problems Activity 5: Categorizing Problems (Part 2) worksheet (Page 3) work on categorizing your brainstormed problems according to UN SDGs.

💡Solving Problems with Technology Activity 1: Features of your Favorite App – investigate your favorite apps and what features of a mobile phone they use.

💡Solving Problems with Technology Activity 2: Quiz Yourself! Given 2 options, choose which is AI and which is not.

📱Exploring Different Mobile App Builders Activity 1: Setting up App Inventor (students will need a Gmail account, they can create one) | Thunkable. You can have the team split up and have half use App Inventor and half use Thunkable to see how they like the platforms. They can report back to the team how they like/dislike the platform.

Note: Setting up can be tricky, as a mentor, you should go through the process yourself prior to the meeting so you can help troubleshoot any problems students may have.

📱Exploring Different Mobile App Builders Activity 2: Coding their first app (App Inventor | Thunkable)

Note for Thunkable: Create a new project, make sure the checkbox “Use the Drag and Drop builder” is checked.

📱Exploring Different Web App builders Activity: Getting started with Python and Streamlit

📱 Algorithms Activity:

Practice writing an algorithm for an everyday task

Goals of the activities:

💡(Ideation) Identifying Problems (90 min)

In these activities students will: 

  • Learn how to classify problems, identify communities they belong to, learn about United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, consider solutions to problems. 
  • The activities will help students choose a problem to focus on. Students should draw on personal experience to find a collective issue to solve. 

💡(Ideation) Solving Problems with Technology (30 min)

In these activities students will: 

  • Learn how technology can be a good way to solve a problem. In addition, they will learn that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being used in all aspects of life to make the world a better place. 
  • Start thinking about their proposed solution for their problem. 
    • Will a mobile app make the best solution? 
    • Choosing between making a mobile app, web app or a progressive web app
    • What features of a mobile phone (i.e. camera, GPS, messaging) could be part of the solution? Is a mobile app the best solution? 
    • Or could AI be a technology that could be used to make a solution to your problem?

📱(Coding) Exploring Different Mobile App Builders (60 min)

In these activities, students will:

  • Determine which app builder is better suited for the project they want to build. This video helps to outline options. Note: the Beginner curriculum covers only App Inventor and Scratch, so if you are working with beginners, use one of those.
  • The Technovation curriculum reviews two block coding platforms – MIT App Inventor and Thunkable. 

ADVICE FROM PAST PARTICIPANTS

Thunkable has a clean interface, innate compatibility with iOS, and availability of features that other app builders might not have

  • App Inventor is reliable and many participants have some familiarity with the tool
  • Swift and Java can be great for returning students who want to challenge themselves or explore different features
  • Other programming languages are acceptable too.

NOTE ON TESTING IN THE 2 PLATFORMS

App Inventor can have challenges getting set up, especially if the network security is locked down (in a school or company). If using the AI Companion on a phone:

  • the device and computer have to be on the same network.
  • try resetting/refreshing both the device and the browser, if it won’t work
  • Try using a different device (a lot of old phones have difficulty connecting)
  • If the phone starts to connect and then an error occurs check if you are connected to a previous session. Reset the connection and try again.
  • Apps with many screens can have loading issues / intermittent success rates when connected via AI Companion. Recommend the team limit the number of screens on their app. They can set the visibility of components to mimic multiple screens.

Using the emulator with App Inventor requires a download of App Inventor software. This can be finicky, but once you get it working, it should continue to work. Some components will not work on the emulator (like AI components).

Thunkable is easier to test with than App Inventor. You can just Preview the app and it runs in the browser. If you want to test on a phone, you have to download the Thunkable app, but it’s pretty straightforward.

📱(Coding) Exploring Different Web App Builders (45 min)

In these activities, students will:

  • Determine which web app language is better suited for the project they want to build and have some experience. 
  • The Technovation curriculum focuses on making web apps with Python. To easily build a web app using Python, we’ll use a framework called Streamlit.

FEATURES OF STREAMLIT

Streamlit allows you to build powerful, interactive web apps with little code.  It specializes in apps involving data, and allows you to easily use Python machine learning libraries to incorporate AI in your apps. 

  • Good option for people who have lots of blocks-based coding experience and are looking for a new challenge
  • Good for people who have done some text-based coding
  • Very versatile language used widely
  • You will need to install software on your computer
    • Python and associated libraries
    • A code editor
  • Streamlit does have option to run in the browser, using Github [Won’t be covered in this curriculum]
  • You can use AI with it
    • Most popular language for building and using machine learning models
    • We’ll use Jupyter Notebooks in this curriculum for model building

📱(Coding) Algorithms (30 min)

In this activity students will:  

  • Learn that an algorithm, a term used in programming, is a set of steps to perform a task.
  • Computers have no intelligence and will only do what they are instructed to do. Programmers must be explicit and detailed when writing the steps needed to perform a task. 

I still have a question

You can always reach out to Technovation’s Volunteer Engagement Team on Slack or at [email protected].

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