The weeks are flying by and summer is almost upon us! This Wednesday already marked our 9th trip to Detroit to meet with the Technology Team. This time, Conroy (DE Consultant) came with me to teach his second lesson.
A big part of Conroy’s job at DE is troubleshooting issues for end users. A customer calls him when they can’t print, when their second monitor isn’t working, or when they can’t connect to the internet. Conroy then figures out the source of the problem and repairs it.
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After a week long hiatus for spring break, Josh (DE Consultant) and I made our way back to Cody to teach the students how clean up and speed up their computers.
When we brainstormed at DE months ago, we thought up fun ideas for the things we’d show the kids at Cody (For example, taking apart an XBOX). The very first time we met with the Cody students, we asked them what they wanted to learn about. To my surprise, they came up with things that we never thought of—things we deemed too boring. One of those “boring” topics the students wanted to learn about was cleaning up viruses.
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Yesterday’s trip to Cody took a new direction. Previous lessons had been about breaking, fixing, and making all things technology. Yesterday’s lesson was about planning for the future.
Mike (Operations Manager) handles the hiring here at DE, so he thought it would be useful to give the students some insight on where to look for jobs and how to land one.
The hour started with some round table discussion. First, Mike asked who was looking for a job this summer. Everyone raised their hands. Then we discussed the process of deciding what type of jobs would be good fits. Mike asked questions about the team’s interests, skills, money requirements/goals, and transportation restrictions.
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Yesterday’s trip to Cody was exciting to say the least. To get some perspective on the lesson, let me first tell you a little about the teacher. (James, DE Programmer).
James taught programming at his own high school in Ypsilanti– when he was still in high school. He also wrote music for his high school and college marching bands. So… he’s basically a genius and built for this volunteer project.
When James started devising his lesson, he asked if he could go two weeks in a row because he had so much to share. Yesterday was part one of his two part lesson on computer programming and music.
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Technology Team meeting 3 took place yesterday. After unbridled participation at the first two official meetings, my expectation for attendance has gotten pretty high. However, yesterday we only had 9 team members. About half the students enrolled at Cody are involved in the ROTC program, and they had a mandatory inspection after school—hence the 50% attendance. Many of our regular contributors dipped in to tell us they’d be back next week though.
No matter the smaller group size, we pressed on with the meeting. We forced each student to eat 2 Jimmy John’s sandwiches so none would go to waste (actually, we dropped the leftovers off with a teacher who was hosting some freshman for another afterschool program).
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Not so much a title as what I just screamed. Here’s the story:
I wanted to indicate two separate quantities in the same cell, under the same heading of a table. The heading was “Workstations” on a price sheet. There were 9 total workstations— 3 of one type, 6 of another. I wanted to indicate this as 3/6. The cell below would correspond with $/$. Seems like a simple request, right?
As I’m sure many of you have experienced, Excel can be a real pain when it thinks it knows what you want to type. Excel said to me, “3/6— you must have meant March-6”.
I said nay. Simple fix, right? So I right clicked, clicked “format cell”, and selected “number”. Expecting my 3/6 to return to cell D4 where I left it, Excel surprised me again. This time, its machine brain assumed I wanted to type “40608.00”. Wrong again, Robot.
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