Murphy’s Law Strikes

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

–Dwight D. Eisenhower

We’ve officially made it through the first two days of camp! It has been an exhausting two days, but I’ve really enjoyed getting to know our students, and we’ve accomplished a lot already.

On day 1, Emily spent the morning teaching the students basic English words like “help” and “repeat.” Most of the students were already familiar with the words, but they seemed to enjoy playing our word games anyway. We played a modified version of tag that transfers the role of “it” to different players when various vocabulary words are said aloud.

I also got a chance to practice the four sentences of Korean that I knew! Apparently, the question “Do you need help?” sounds pretty similar to “Do you need money?” because the students gave me confused looks when I tried to ask them if they needed help. On the bright side, I quickly learned how to say, “I need money,” which could be useful in the future 😛

For lunch, we had soondubu (tofu soup) at a nearby restaurant.

In the afternoon, we whipped out the Raspberry Pi computers, and Emu walked the students through an activity using the Google Voice Kits. Although we had some issues with slow wifi, it was cool to see how excited the students were when they finally got their Voice Kit working. The Voice Kit mimics Google Assistant and can answer questions preceded by the phrase, “Ok, Google.” If only we could get Google Assistant to work in Korean without too much hassle… that could be a task for the team next year 🙂

As soon as class let out and the students left, our team started preparing for the next day’s activities. There was a slight blip in our supplies ordering process, so we were short on Raspberry Pi cameras. Shine and I dashed to Leocom (part of Yongsan Electronics Market) and bought their last Pi camera in stock. We made it to the store fifteen minutes before closing time, so we were very proud of our accomplishment. I think this was our fifth consecutive day in Yongsan. We’re so familiar with the area at this point that we could give tours of the place.

Just after buying the last Pi camera from Leocom at Yongsan Electronics Market

On the way back from Yongsan, I used my expert skills at spotting the word 약 to find a pharmacy for Shine. I was very proud of myself. We also picked up fried chicken for dinner from BHC, which was delicious.

The rest of the evening consisted of heavy-duty preparation for day 2. We had a detailed day 1 debrief where we discussed each of our students and assessed their English and STEM abilities. I was dead tired at this point and lying on the ground, but for what it’s worth, I think we did a pretty good job of evaluating our students’ strengths and weaknesses based on a day’s worth of interactions with them.

The objective of day 2 was to introduce the students to computer programming. I was in charge of both the morning and the afternoon, so I was pretty stressed out all day. The morning went better than I imagined. I taught the students how to play hangman, and they seemed to really enjoy it.

We then moved down to the computer lab, and I had the students work on drawing pictures using a block-based programming language that could be set to English, Korean, or Chinese. I wanted the students to focus on computational thinking instead of getting caught up in programming language syntax or the language barrier, so the Turtle Blockly-based game worked perfectly. I was super happy to see how much a lot of the students enjoyed it. Some of our students who weren’t as engaged yesterday actually showed interest in programming, which was wonderful to see. After the block-based programming language, I switched the students over to some basic Turtle programming with Python. Many students picked it up quickly, though to be completely honest, the programming was still very basic.

Sitting in front of a computer for a long time is very energy-consuming. When it was clear that the students had checked out and were having trouble concentrating, we moved back to the first floor and held a hangman competition. It was awesome to see students who participated less frequently actually volunteer to choose words for their team. Some even used dictionaries and the Internet to find new words that they thought would be difficult. For a game that we introduced somewhat by chance, it certainly helped us achieve many of our objectives.

They ran out of lunch for me and Shine, so we ended up grabbing katsu from the restaurant next door. Apparently, the restaurant had been featurd on television in the past and was visited by numerous celebrities.

Murphy’s Law struck during the afternoon. Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong, but I did my best to alleviate any problems that arose.

As part of the Voice Kit activity from Day 1, we had flashed the Raspberry Pi SD cards with a special Voice Kit image. This specific operating system was based on Raspbian but had some additional scripts pre-written for the Voice Kit activity. Because it looked so similar to the default Raspbian distribution on the official Raspberry Pi website, I assumed everything would work fine if we reused the Voice Kit image for the remainder of our activities.

I was wrong. The official distribution of Raspbian has an application called Sonic Pi pre-installed. However, as it turns out, the Voice Kit image does not have Sonic Pi installed. The entire afternoon was dedicated to working with Sonic Pi, which is obviously impossible without the software. We had all the kids open up a terminal window to download Sonic Pi from the internet, but because of the unreliable wifi, it took a really long time for the software to download.

Somewhat fortunately, I had an extra activity from the morning that did not rely on Sonic Pi. It involved playing a game that is meant to familiarize people with basic terminal commands. It was definitely not a crowd favorite, but at the very least, it probably made the terminal seem less daunting to the students. I don’t expect any of them to actually remember the commands, but next time they use the actual terminal on the Raspberry Pi, they will have some idea of what each command does.

The problems didn’t stop after Sonic Pi finished installing. Sonic Pi is a programming environment that allows users to create music by writing lines of code. Obviously, it would be nice to hear the music that you create, but (not so) lucky for us, the audio jacks on the Raspberry Pis were not working. I ended up telling everyone to reuse the Voice Kit hat from yesterday, which sent audio output to a speaker.

At that point, I was pretty stressed out because of issues with downloading Sonic Pi and getting audio playback to work, but I think the students who got it working, in the end, had a fun time. When I got back home, I wrote the code to play Yiruma’s River Flows in You using Sonic Pi; I plan on showing it to the class today to convince them that programming using Sonic Pi is pretty cool after all.

After our team debrief, I spent the rest of the evening trying to troubleshoot the audio situation on the Raspberry Pi. Apparently, the Voice Kit image not only had additional scripts pre-written, but it also had special audio settings to make the Voice Kit Hat + speaker combination work. Those audio settings redirected the audio output to somewhere other than the audio jack. Instead of fiddling with the Voice Kit image, I decided to flash all the Raspberry Pi SD cards with the official Raspbian image with all the default settings.

Easy enough, right? No. It took me 3.5 hours to simply download the Raspbian image (1.7 GB) from the internet. It also didn’t help that I accidentally put my laptop to sleep halfway through the first attempt, which meant that I actually spent 5 or so hours waiting for the download to finish. By the time I finally got around to flashing SD cards, it was already past midnight. I am so grateful, though, that everything after that went smoothly.

All in all, I think our preparation has been super useful. We’ve had to deal with unexpected problems—I guess that’s what you get when you have unit tests but no integration tests—but we resolved them with as much grace as we could muster. We continue to spend our evenings frantically preparing for the next day’s activities, and I’m confident that the additional preparation will pay off even if things don’t go as planned.

Touchdown in Korea

As of yesterday, our entire team has landed safely in Seoul and moved into our Airbnb apartment! For our first team dinner, we had garlic fried chicken—more flavor than generic fried chicken but not too spicy either—and complimentary corn pops (unofficial name).

Day 0 Dinner: Garlic fried chicken and corn pops

Today was our first full day together in Korea, and I’m super proud of how productive we were. We left the apartment around 9 AM and grabbed breakfast on the way to the train station.

Up until today, our biggest concern was purchasing 9 sets of computer monitors, keyboards, and mice for under $900. A significant portion of our curriculum involves working with Raspberry Pis, which meant that finding or not finding these monitors would make or break our workshop. After browsing online, we quickly realized that computer monitors under $100 are pretty difficult to come by, so we weren’t sure how successful we would be. In hindsight, we could have done a better job with risk assessment…

Fortunately, we learned about the Yongsan Electronics Market and took the subway there first thing after breakfast. This place is like paradise for any computer geek. There are thousands of shops that sell various electronics, including computer hard drives, GPUs, and gaming keyboards, all at wholesale prices.

Printer lane

Hard drives galore

Motherboards (fan included!)

Not only did we find great deals for wireless keyboards and mice, but we also found some ridiculously cheap used monitors, which were perfect for our use case.

Buying keyboards

Used computer monitors

Notice the empty space near the front where 9 computer monitors used to stand.

Electronics shopping

We were beyond excited to find these cheap monitors.

Deconstructing the monitors to fit in a suitcase

We managed to purchase all 9 monitors for 250,000 won total. If that’s not a great deal, then I don’t know what is. Rest assured, every one of the monitors works perfectly (we checked).

The best part of the trip to the electronics store besides getting awesome deals on everything was probably seeing the confused looks on the shopkeepers’ faces. We were the only females shopping at the electronics market, so I guess people took notice. I must say we did look pretty badass lugging around boxes and a suitcase full of electronics, though.

Back at the apartment

Flashing SD cards

Makeshift quality assurance station on the floor

We didn’t have much time for lunch before our meeting with the science teacher, so we enjoyed some Korean pizza while lounging on the bedroom floor.

Shine was our main channel of communication with the science teacher during the semester, and both Emily and Emu taught at the school in previous years, which meant that I was the only person who had never spoken to the science teacher. Although I don’t speak a word of Korean, and the science teacher has limited English ability, I could tell by the way he talked about his students—thanks to Shine’s amazing translations—that he knows a lot about and cares a lot about his students.

School building

Near Seoul Comics Road

I got to see the inside of the classroom and the computer lab for the first time, and it was all very exciting. This was the first school I’ve been to that requires people to take off their shoes and wear indoor slippers. We learned that our students are a bit older than we expected (between the ages of 17 and 30) and that their English ability is limited to the alphabet and basic words. I have a decent amount of experience teaching different audiences, but I’ve never had to teach a group of students who didn’t speak English, so that’s probably going to be my biggest challenge. Let’s hope that my carefully crafted slides with lots of animated pictures will help me get the main ideas across. In the worst case scenario, we have Naver translations.

Quick side story: I learned yesterday that even Google Translate can be a bit rough. Shine was looking through my slides and laughing at some of the improperly translated Korean, which I copied from Google Translate. She was kind enough to help me fix everything, though 🙂

My team and I have put a lot of time and effort into prepping all our activities for our STEM workshop. After talking with the science teacher, I’m even more excited to meet our students on Monday. We’re going to have a blast during these next few weeks!

Shopping for supplies resumed immediately after our meeting. Our next stop was the eight-story Daiso in Myungdong. Yes, that’s right. I said eight stories.

150,000+ won worth of Daiso shopping

All eight floors of Daiso

Binders galore

This is what I’ve been missing all my life. Does your banana have a case?

We spent a few hours at Daiso and bought more than 150,000 won worth of stuff. The lady at the cashier definitely gave us some weird looks, but according to Emu, they spent even more money at Daiso last year.

After bringing all the supplies back to the apartment, I decided to do a test run of the Expeditions virtual reality app for Google Cardboard with Emu and Shine. They seemed to get a real kick out of it, so I think the students will enjoy it, too. The nice thing is that you don’t have to know English in order to enjoy VR.

Testing out Expeditions using Google Cardboard

Emu and Emily were craving chicken and cheese, so we ended up going to 내가찜한닭 동국대점 for jjimdak.

Day 1 Dinner: Jjimdak

Regular spicy jjimdak

Jjimdak with cheese

Chicken closeup

Dripping cheese closeup

The food was delicious (probably my favorite meal in Korea so far) but also spicier than anticipated. We went through at least 4 jugs of water, which got us some confused looks from the waitress. Perhaps it was because we had ordered one spicy jjimdak (for Shine and me) and one non-spicy jjimdak (for Emily and Emu), yet we were all low key dying from the hotness level. The waitresses’ facial expression was priceless when she told Shine that the non-spicy jjimdak had nothing but soy sauce and thus should not be spicy at all. My favorite quote from the night was from Emu: “We’re all eating food that we think is spicy.” Indeed, there has never been a truer statement. I cannot imagine how spicy the extra hot jjimdak would have been…

I’m super happy with how much we accomplished today. I think we’re definitely coming together as a team, and sharing personal stories about each other while chugging water has definitely added to our growing collection of shared team memories.

Tidbits

Conflict of interest in levels of formality. During our meeting with the science teacher, we learned that a decent number of our students are older than we are. In many cultures, this wouldn’t be a huge issue, but when speaking a language like Korean, which has different politeness levels, sometimes there are conflicts of interest in determining which level of formality to use. In general, the older person is higher in the hierarchy, which means the younger person should speak to the older person with greater formality. However, students must also speak to their teachers with greater formality, which makes this situation more complicated. Here the student is older than the teacher. Shine mentioned that a similar conflict of interest occurs with army rank versus age, which is why men are encouraged to join the army at the same age as everyone else to avoid frustrations of reporting to a higher official who is also younger.

Recycling. My family dropped me off at the apartment yesterday, and Shine picked us up from outside the building. As we were walking in, however, the security guard stopped us and lectured Shine for a solid 3 minutes or so. I thought it was an issue of bringing in outside people into the apartment, but apparently, the security guard was just concerned about making sure that all the guests recycled properly. Foreigners don’t have a great track record of recycling, and as an American, I can see why. Korea, unlike America, is big on recycling, and people can actually get in trouble for doing a poor job of recycling. Apparently, our apartment building has been called out for it in the past, so we’re all trying our best to recycle properly.

Black dogs. Our apartment is located near a street full of pet stores selling puppies. We saw two adorable black dogs (sorry, I’m bad with dog breeds) from outside the window, but Shine explained that they would probably never get adopted by Koreans because there is a stigma against black dogs in Korea. She mentioned, however, that South Korea’s new president actually adopted a black rescue dog, which was a departure from the tradition of adopting a pure-bred white Jindo dog to be the “First Pet.” Times are a-changin’.