My next outreach activity was a volunteer event for a club on campus called the Association for Computing Machinery - Women (ACM-W). For the event, 6 members of ACM-W were monitoring breakout rooms on Microsoft Teams for the Future City Competition. The Future City Competition was for middle schoolers who created city designs. The day of the event, the students answered questions from judges about their cities.
As Outreach Coordinator for ACM-W, I was the one who signed us up for this event and did my best to make sure our volunteers were doing okay during the event. To say it ran without hiccups would be a lie. The event was only an hour with 10 minutes for each student group to answer questions, which was barely enough time for the judges to introduce themselves and then rattle through their list of questions. As a result of being online, this made the event move fast. Furthermore, the Mines students were supposed to be recording the sessions, which we were unable to do because we weren't the host of the meetings. Some of the Mines students were unable to enter their meeting rooms on time.
The whole event was a bit of a mess, but the middle school students remained professional and flexible about the rushed structure of the event. In terms of things I learned specifically from this event, there are a couple of things that stand out. The first thing I learned is that everything takes longer online. The second is to always expect technical issues because if you don't plan for them you'll be in trouble. Luckily, the event coordinators had set up a help room that many of us Mines students paid a visit to and were able to have our problems fixed. The final thing I learned is that when planning events, one must be incredibly explicit with the details. While the judges thought the students were giving presentations about the cities they created, the students only thought they were answering questions about it. This confusion was placated after the first round in my room, after which the judges just jumped straight into their questions.