The MOUSE Squad Wire

Greetings all 8th and 9th graders! For those of you who are new, welcome to the program and we hope you have a really great year. For those coming back to us, thanks for taking the time and interest to return to Mouse Squad and congratulations for coming this far!

We have a really fun opportunity for you. MOUSE is hosting a pizza party/research group for about 15 of you to come and hang out and talk about technology, school and well, life in general. In New York, the party will be on October 16th at 4pm at the Puck Building (295 Lafayette St), and in Chicago, we will be announcing the date and location shortly. Participants will receive pizza and refreshments and— best of all– a $50 gift certificate to Best Buy!

If interested, please email me, Nishanthi (nishanthi@mouse.org), with your name, age, grade, and school you attend.

Hope to see you there!

P.S. We even take care of your Metro card!

My name is Jonathan Bettencourt, and I’m a senior in college attending Polytechnic University. I’ve been working with Mouse as an intern for a year now, and I’m responsible for all design and development on the Mouse Squad Locator - which was recently made available, here on The Wire. As a Computer Science major, I understand that there are many students out there who wonder what it’s like to work on web-to-database project like the Mouse Squad Locator. What I’d like to do is briefly describe what that process was like for me.

In the beginning, I met with my supervisor – Ted Bongiovanni – to figure out a set of needs, wants, and goals for the project.

We used these requirements as a guide to develop building blocks, or rather, “steps” I would work on every week. These steps were recorded as case files in “FogBugz”, a system we use to track progress on particular steps. Ted would create the case file, and I would respond to it with my data for that step. The next week, I would meet with Ted to discuss my progress on the current cases, re-evaluate the project’s needs, and adjust my workload as we saw fit.

After setting up this framework, it was my job to actually accomplish the cases, using web development technology. In doing so, I found that I was doing much more than programming another piece of code; I was designing the code on an architectural level, documenting changes, trying out new approaches to tasks, recording results, analyzing results, and researching info on various programming languages and code. Most importantly, I was developing using “iteration” – which means, I was creating something small, then going back and revising it, or adding more features to it.

The Mouse Squad Locator in and of itself was created through iteration:

	Build 1, New York City only with minimal features.
	Build 2, New York City only with borough search features.
	Build 4, National view.
	Build 6, Modified National view w/ additional search features.

Now that the maps are live, I look back on the Mouse Squad Locator’s progression and realize that designing and developing it was an exercise in learning how to learn. It’s one thing to attend college – or any school, for that matter – and learn a particular subject, but I believe that using different skills together is what’s needed for professional work in any tech field today.

Ever wanted to know if there are other MOUSE Squads near your school? Or how many MOUSE Squads there are in New York, or California, or anywhere else?

Thanks to the hard work of our Technology Intern, Jonathan, you can now find all of the schools with operating MOUSE Squads using the Google Maps interface. Check out the new MOUSE Squad Locator here.

What’s NECC? The National Education Computing Conference. It’s organized by the International Society for Technology in Education– a nonprofit membership association, that strives to improve teaching, learning, and school leadership by advancing the effective use of technology in PK-12 and teacher education. This year, MOUSECORPS students Ryan Mason and Syed Zaidi presented their experiential learning projects at NECC–they’re going to be posting about their experiences soon, in the meantime, check out this photo gallery.

Instructables.com offers step-by-step illustrated instructions on how to replace the boring casing of your USB memory stick with a lego! This is a fun, easy project to customize your technology.

Click here for details.

Two exciting components of the MOUSECORPS program are now underway: Experiential Learning Projects (ELP) and Job Shadowships.

Just to clear up any confusion, the requirements for participation in MOUSECORPS have changed. Here’s how:

1. MOUSECORPS is not a year-long commitment. Students can participate in MOUSECORPS on a project by project basis. If you are more interested in college experience than Experiential Learning Projects/Advanced training, you only have to attend the workshops and field trips connected to college experience.
2. MOUSECORPS is open to all high school students (grades 9 – 12). The only requirement is that you have at least one year of MOUSE Squad experience!
3. To participate in a MOUSECORPS Workshop, students must enroll online. Check the calendar for MOUSECORPS meetings.

If you’re interested in participating in MOUSECORPS Career Shadowships, send your resume to jimmy@mouse.org, with the subject line: Shadowship.

If you’re interested in submitting an ELP proposal, send and email to jimmy@mouse.org, with the subject line: ELP. Hurry, proposal deadlines are coming up on December 20^th. Don’t miss your chance to go on the next MOUSECORPS Spring Retreat.

Tags: high school, mousecorps, students

As you may know, MOUSE requires all student participants to keep track of the number of hours spent participating in MOUSE Squad and the types of activities in which they take part. Now, our partners at Fordham University have designed a nifty on-line tool for tracking your hours. It even keeps track of and shows you graphic images of your hours to date, among other functions. We hope you will find this new tool useful!

Students: If you have not done so already, please go HERE to sign in and begin using the tool. Remember to visit it weekly to update your hours!

PLEASE NOTE: Sign in using the same email you use for mousesquad.org, e-Learning and use the initial password: 12345 the first time you sign in. You can always change your password later if you wish.

Faculty Advisors: Please check out the hours tool also! ALL squads (within NYC and outside!), regardless if they have agreed to participate in the Fordham study, must use this tool for tracking hours. Faculty advisors will have the ability to see your entire squad’s hours and track the exact types of work they are performing for your school!

Questions? Contact Courtenay Carmody at courtenay@mouse.org.

Long before laptops roll off an assembly line, designers, engineers and software developers collaborate to produce a product. Recently two MOUSE Squad students from Riverdale Kingsbridge Academy in the Bronx, Leroy and Lawy Tindi acted on an opportunity to be hands on with this exciting new technology.

The OLPC boards are works-in-progress and differ from the shrink-wrapped products to which we are usually exposed. Adam Mayer from Wireless Generation led a workshop for MOUSE Squad so that the device and the project could become more than an abstraction.

Adam and Ted Bongiovanni, MOUSE Program Director presented a brief overview of the OLPC project. Leroy and Lawy talked about how their school environment would change if everyone had laptops.

Adam talked Leroy and Lawy through what it took to get the board up and running. Next Adam identified the components on the board–for example, he explained that there was little shielding for the wireless network adapter, which meant that it was challenging to lock in on a signal. Once we all connected the components, Leroy and Lawi tinkered with machine’s interface. When asked what applications they thought would be important to be included they both thought that writing tools would be critical.

Next, we disassembled the boards and asked Leroy and Lawi to put them back together again and boot the device–they performed this task with ease. Finally, Ted took Leroy and Lawi on a quick tour of the OLPC wiki and demonstrated it as a potential collaborative writing tool for the devices. Want to be a part of the next event? Send an email to ted at mouse dot org.

How would your school change if everyone had an laptop with a fast internet connection? What if you could bring the laptops home? What would you do with them? Sound off in the comments.

Museum information: http://www.movingimage.us/

Date: Friday, November 10th, 9:30AM - 1:30PM

Description: Due to the popularity of our visit last year, MOUSE is returning to the Museum of the Moving Image for our Fall Middle School Field Trip. The Museum of the Moving Image is a dynamic learning environment where the art, history and technology of film, television and digital media present creative opportunities for teaching the core curriculum. After the museum tour, MOUSE will provide lunch at the Kaufman Astoria Film Studio Cafe.

Location: The Museum entrance is on 35th Avenue at the corner of 36th Street in Astoria. Take the R or V to Steinway.

Sign-up Now! There are a limited number of spots available for this trip - registration is on a first-come, first-serve basis - preference will be shown to schools who did NOT attend this trip last year. Please fill out and return the this application (http://www.mousesquad.org/blank_application.doc) with no more than 10 students (we may be able to accept more depending on availability). Email it to jimmy@mouse.org or fax it to (212) 226-5619.