What has quarantine meant for the three directors of SummerTech/Coditum and for the program itself? Join us for Episode 1 of the SummerTech Podcast!
Podcast Transcript
This transcript is automatically generated. If you notice any errors, please contact the commodore.
Matthew Baptist:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to our currently untitled podcast. We have no intro music. Do we have intro music?
Intro music added in post-production plays in the background.
Ben Ehrlich:
We have intro music!
Steven Fink:
It’s playing right now.
Intro music plays out.
Matthew Baptist:
I’m Matt Baptist, I’m the director of curriculum. We also have Steven Fink the owner and founder of SummerTech and Coditum. And we have Ben our illustrious tech director.
Ben Ehrlich:
I also reserve the title of Commodore.
Steven Fink:
Commodore?
Ben Ehrlich:
Commodore, like Commodore Perry and Commodore 64.
Steven Fink:
Does that get us military discounts or anything?
What have we been doing during quarantine?
Steven Fink:
Well, I would say that talking about what we’ve been doing during quarantine is really more like what we would have been doing had there not been a quarantine as opposed to what we’re doing.
Matthew Baptist:
Well, I mean that says something about us in general.
Steven Fink:
Well we’re used to spending our summers together, living in a dormitory building, spending all day long at a computer camp. And this year we did all that from home.
Matthew Baptist:
So we’ve, we’ve come out now from being six months, I think. Wow. Time’s flown. We have been teaching online in a variety of different formats, doing different kinds of activities. Now for half a year for the three of us, what are some challenges about bringing what we do or any kind of education into a digital space?
Ben Ehrlich:
I’d say the biggest challenge at first for me at least was logistics. You know, we were thrust into this position of how do we turn an in-person experience into an online experience. And for me, that meant how do we connect students and teachers to each other. And fun fact, there were not a lot of easy programmatic ways to do that. And we ended up going with the Google Calendar API because there is no Google Hangouts, API and Google APIs are not great to work with. Not great, but we did it.
Steven Fink:
Well, there goes our sponsorship.
Ben Ehrlich:
This podcast is brought to you by Google Cloud Platform*!
Steven Fink:
Oh gosh. Well, we had a summer of sponsored plugs. Did you find that the logistical issues started to become easier to manage as we went along? Or did they sort of intensify as the number of students that we were sort of seeing rose over time?
Ben Ehrlich:
Well, there was, a few switching moments. The first one was once we had the system in place where we were automatically connecting students, it just kind of worked set it, and forget it. Everybody was getting connected. There were some issues with people not reading their email or people not receiving the email, but for the most part, it was pretty smooth sailing. When we switched from the one-on-one Coditum classes to the summer tech summer classes, that was a, that was a horse of a different color. That was a real, that was tough, but we did it, we pulled through and we had a great experience. And I think a lot of people had a lot of fun. Myself included.
Zoom Fatigue and the Power of Connection
Matthew Baptist:
Steve, from your perspective, what were some of the challenges of either more broadly education online or specifically what we were doing of bringing adopting our classes to this different format?
Steven Fink:
You know I think it was kind of a time thing. You know, we, this all happening in the country, in the world towards the end of school, everybody’s suddenly forced to learn how to do online education. Of course, there’s going to be all of these pitfalls and struggles and frustrations. And we’re coming in on the tail of that. Which, you know, in our advantage came with very low expectations, but it also came with a lot of cynicism, a lot of skepticism and some of our regulars kids who, you would think would never miss any opportunity to be back with us in any way. We’re like, eh, this doesn’t sound like fun to me. I’m so sick of, you know, I’m not good with the school online thing. I don’t want to just sit there and Zoom classes. And so some of them didn’t come along. Some of them eventually did and found out that, Oh, I’m actually getting what I was missing. Right? You can’t ever, we create the, a person experience of course. But I was just so impressed with how our staff were able to just create connection and be into it. You know, I don’t know how other programs work but what’s so cool about our staff is it’s way more than just teaching a class for these guys. It’s, you know, they’ll, I was amazed how often they were spending their time, yeah, sure, they were working and we hired them to do these things, but it seemed like they would always go above and beyond to make sure an activity is running. Right. They weren’t just there, you know, watching it and making sure everyone was behaved. It was real productivity that made it very special. And when we sent out surveys, it was overwhelmingly positive. And you know, and I shared a lot of this with a lot of other camp communities out there and a lot of other camp directors, the different groups that I’m on, you know, how we do what we did and what was so successful. I don’t think it’s, I don’t think it’s the quality of our classes–though the quality of our classes is top notch. I don’t think that’s what made our day so successful. I think it was all about the connection because when we do teach in our classes, it’s not like we just stick kids in front of software, you’re putting them with people and you’re having some kind of interaction. So even if, even if there’s a moment of not learning of moment of levity, a moment of fun, that’s all part of the experience. And I think that’s that’s what we did so well. So just getting over that hump of, of getting people to buy into, continuing to do this this summer.
Matthew Baptist:
Is there anything you found particularly successful when, or you found yourself trying to do in order to get people over that hump when you were communicating with them or encouraging them to try a camp or an online class or something?
Steven Fink:
You know, I’m always amazed at how powerful, just having a conversation can be with someone. If you leave it up to them, if you say, okay, here’s what we have to offer you and put it out there as a marketing email and they can look at it and then have their own conversations and are already leaning towards, well, I don’t want to do online work. I want my kids going outside or whatever. You’re just going to probably lean that way. But just by sending out a personal email to somebody or a text with some of these parents that I texted with or phone calls, sometimes it was almost like, Oh, that’s right. I forgot about this. There’s so much going on right now that you know, or, you know, let me talk to them again. Because maybe I didn’t have a clear conversation with them or, and very often it turned it around where to where like, all right, they’ll try it, they’ll give it a shot or humor me because look, I have a 13 year old she was spending day after day, just sort of wallowing away isolated. Uh and you’re, it’s tough because you want these kids off their electronics as much as possible. So, you know, here we go, we set them up with all of this medium. And then we say, well, we don’t really want you to use it because we think it’s bad. Cause we didn’t do this as kids. So I think I think parents were just sort of like, Oh, this is actually a really worthwhile week for my kids. Yeah. What I want them outside, what I’d rather them at camp. Of course we all would, but they were getting such a better experience than if they were just sitting in a home or following along with some online curriculum or something. You know, they, we, we got them connected all day long. You know, I, some of our competitor programs, they’ll give you a couple of hours. We’re giving kids from 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM.
Ben Ehrlich:
Who could you possibly be referring to when you say just a few hours of programming?
Steven Fink:
You know, there’s a few out there. All of our competitors are, are excellent. We just think we do a little bit better.
Thursday Night Surprise
Thursday night surprise is a long-standing camp tradition in which staff prepare a special event for sleep-over campers. It’s generally a performance or large scale activity. There was even a pirate ship once.
Matthew Baptist:
One thing you mentioned when talking about our staff really just impressed me too. The buy in. One of the really special things that we’ve always done at summer tech, that’s always been, we call it the least well kept secret at summer tech is, we do something called the Thursday Night Surprise. And it’s one of the most, you know, we, we have for viewers who have not attended summer tech or are unfamiliar with it. It’s one of our most camp like traditions. I think that we do, we do a lot of things to sort of blend being a traditional type program first being a traditional camp and Thursday Night Surprise falls firmly in the camp activity sort of range. And it’s something it’s typically as it evolved into kind of a show that we’ve put on for our overnighters. So our staff create some original activity or event or something like that. And one of the most exciting things about the summer was watching our staff, bring it to the new medium and open it up to everyone. And they found really creative ways to take advantage of the fact that we were online and turn that into sort of an asset and a feature of what we were doing on our Thursday nights as opposed to a detriment. So they did some really cool things and it was fun seeing the staff come back, seeing kids from previous weeks, come back each week just to watch the Thursday night surprise and be part of that community for a little bit, as well as staff members who had worked and then were busy and unable to work coming back to be part of Thursday night surprises. So that was very rewarding and kind of cool to see the power of the online camp.
Ben Ehrlich:
I was so impressed by that. I was so impressed with our stuff. I’m always so impressed with our staff. And parents, I think you will be too!
Matthew Baptist:
All right. I think we can tone down the direct, sell.
The End
Outro music plays.
Ben Ehrlich:
Can we get a, “this has been the summer tech podcast?”
Matthew Baptist:
This has been summer tech podcast. Thank you guys for joining us.
Steven Fink:
Is it summertech podcast? Is it summertech coditum podcast? Is it cod-it-ium?
Cod-it-um is a typical mispronunciation of our year-round program’s name, cOH-dEE-tum.
Voice and music fades out.
*Google Cloud Platform is a cloud computing playform sold by Google. We are not sponsored by or affiliated with them in any way. Google does not endorse or condone our podcast or our program.
