Today I volunteered with a SWE run event called Girls Lead the Way (GLTW). SWE stands for Society of Women Engineers and Mines boasts that we the largest collegiate section in the country. GLTW is an event for high schoolers that lets them interact with Mines students to learn more about college and Mines and different majors. Along with my sister, who happens to also study Computer Science at Mines, I ran two sessions of the Computer Science activity. Our activity consisted of a Python coding workshop.
Our first session was the first of 3 hour long major sessions that the girls attended, so they were still engaged, enthusiastic, and excited. They asked us technical questions about what coding languages were taught at Mines and the workload, while also asking about sports and club involvement. Not only that, but they seemed to enjoy the activity. The trick with teaching such a short session on coding is that you are guaranteed to have students with different levels of coding experience. The trick with this is keeping the girls who finished earlier something to keep them occupied, to give the less experienced programmers time to finish their code. We split into two breakout rooms, which allowed one group to ask my sister Laura their questions and the other group to ask me theirs. This seemed to work out well.
Upon noticing the many questions on the tip of the girls tongues and the glossed over looks as we went through the slides, we asked if they wanted us to switch to just answering questions about CS@Mines. To our surprise, they said no. They were enjoying programming in Python and wanted to continue with the activity. Fortunately, while some of the students were more advanced programmers, many had not used Python before which made it something interesting to learn. Therefore, we continued on with our lesson until about 10 minutes remained and filled that remaining time with questions. Overall, the first session went very well.
On the other hand, the level of enthusiasm and engagement during the second session, which was their third major specific activity of the day, dropped drastically. It was clear they were growing tired of sitting at their computer all day, listening and following along with the leaders of the activities. That's the tough part about online learning and events. We thrive from being in person with each other and being able to read each other's body language. While it is beneficial that we are still able to communicate with technology, there is no doubt that it is not the same as being in person. Zoom fatigue is real.
Previous research enlightened me with a few reasons for why Zoom tires us out. One, we did not evolve to stare directly into the faces of multiple other people for hours at a time. Not only does Zoom allows us to do this, but it expects us to be looking at our computer screen with our camera on during meetings to show that we are paying attention. Two, while it may be unknown to us for the most part, we heavily rely on nonverbal communication, such as body language. Three, video calls make it easier to multitask and increase the urge to multitask. We join a Zoom call with emails open and homework open and messages open. Finally, we have to put more effort into paying attention to the communication over video conferencing apps, while reaping significantly less of a reward from it. It is important enough to be repeated, Zoom fatigue is real.
The question that remains is how do we avoid zoom fatigue? Some tips include turning off our video cameras when they are not necessary, but that leaves us with the bizarre circumstance of speaking to a black screen. We also need to remind ourselves to take breaks where we step away from our computers and walk around our house or even outside. I remember in some of my past classes, teachers would tell the students to stand up and stretch when they saw students eyes begin to gloss over. Maybe that is something I could have used during my Girls Lead the Way activity. We also could have given the girls a general one or two minute break, just encouraging them to turn off their cameras and give their eyes a break from staring at their screen. I've been in school long enough to know the tools that help students focus, I just need to dig deeper and remember to use them.
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