Within four days, I started a new full-time job, followed by an evening computer class. When I was a secondary math and science teacher, I advocated for my students to be lifelong learners. Wouldn’t my former students be proud that after all these years, I’m still practicing what I preached?
I redesigned my schedule in order to redesign my life. Like a true student, I’m reading more than ever about coding because my personable data science instructor entertains, but doesn’t quite teach. Nonetheless, as a former teacher, I feel it’s my responsibility to learn the material. He’s just there to guide us through the curriculum and cheer us on.
To my surprise, there is still enough time in the day. While I no longer read while watching TV, at least I’m ploughing through it at a reasonable clip. I’m no longer juggling my creative projects during the week, but the weekends have become just that sweeter. That’s when I can illustrate, film edit, and apparently write and direct my Chatbot project.
Four of us Data Science students were thrown into a group together–just like the other five groups in that class. This is just the latest instance where my directing and writing skills truly come in handy. I essentially pitched my idea and won one other person to join the Chatbot group. The other two were placed in the group by the instructor. None of us feel to confident about our coding skills. Nonetheless, we divvied up roles, where I volunteered to introduce the project. We’d all attempt coding even though one person in the group would explain it.
At the end of the last computer class prior to our presentation, I scheduled a 30-minute Zoom meeting with my group. It was the first time we took the opportunity to do so. Before then, we’d only communicated via a private Slack channel. We volleyed ideas back and forth with the makings of a project plan. Two of us had previously thought we’d have to do the project solo.
Fortunately, our combined ideas are better than two individual ones. I expanded my idea about having my mother’s voicemails being the Chatbot. Another woman thought how to monetize a medical Chatbot. So, between the two of us, we had half of the project roles covered. Now we have the weekend to fill in the blanks.
In addition to writing my introduction/pitch to “Global Grandmother Cures,” I’m going to outline a script of the presentation. I figure, even if the content is shaky, we can tighten up the presentation itself. My goal is to send that out by Saturday, so I can work on coding something simple on Sunday, then rehearse on Monday.
All of that looks good on paper. Let’s see how much we can pull off.