St. Johnsbury Academy Jeju

STEAM Department Growth I was hired at this position to expand their existing Computer Science program. Over the course of my first year, the student enrollment in STEAM courses more than doubled, requiring us to expand the department from 1.5 full time equivalent positions three full time teachers, where it remains. This year, our combined enrollment in STEAM classes at the HS level is 216, including forty-five students in AP courses. K-12 STEAM & Robotics Coordinator This growth led directly to the creation of a K-12 STEAM Coordinator role at the school, which I have filled since its creation. In this role, I have led our school’s efforts to vertically align our STEAM curriculum as we prepare for our NEASC accreditation. In addition, I have been involved in refreshing our 3D printer and laser cutter fleets. This has involved looking closely at local providers and equipment to ensure that teachers have equipment which does not need constant servicing by the teacher. CS Honor Society In my first year, I also founded the first international chapter of the CS Honor Society, providing an outlet for students to use their knowledge and mastery of Computer Science to help the community. Over the three years of our program, students have logged hundreds of hours and built multiple web-based programs for communities within the school to help meet their needs. Examples include: An English translation of the school lunch menu, translated and updated automatically from the vendor’s website A Service Hours tracker to allow students in NHS, CSHS, and other societies to track and submit service hours easily. We have also run a STEAM Faire every CS Education Week, in which the students of CSHS lead the way in showcasing student work and accomplishment from all divisions in STEAM classes. This faire is open to the public and the guides within it are all members of CSHS. Robotics In addition to Computer Science, I have also played a key role in the expansion of their robotics competition program. I am the founding head coach for our High School teams. We successfully hosted three tournaments our first year, requiring extensive planning and logistical coordination with our athletics, facilities, and student volunteer teams. Our first year as a team, students from our program won the Korean National Tournament, earning themselves a space at the 2024 Vex World Championships in Dallas, TX. As part of my role, I chaperoned our school’s first trip to the US, bringing six students to Dallas for a week. In our second year, we will be hosting four tournaments again, as well a running a League between four other schools in our athletics league. We have expanded the program greatly through capital investments and also through training coaches to provide high quality coaching and mentoring for our teams. I am also a certified Event Partner, meaning I am certified to host Vex Tournaments at any level. I have developed a plan for our school to apply to host a Signature Event (a prestigious tournament category within Vex which requires extensive planning and coordination). AI Committee With the rise of generative AIs, I became intimately involved in the role of AI at our school. I was one of the first teachers to require students to use AI in their projects and I did a detailed analysis of the efficacy of AI Detection Tools, which became the foundation of our school’s policy regarding academic dishonesty and AI tools. In 2024, I was a member of our AI Committee and drafted large parts of the document which became our initial policy. I was part of the decision to adopt MagicSchool school-wide as our preferred AI platform. Since that adoption, I have been one of the key trainers for that tool in our school.

Ruamrudee International School

Program Creation I was hired at this position to launch a Computer Science program in the Middle School. When initially hired, they had been teaching Computer Science in their high school for several years. There was high demand for the program and over the course of my stay, there was consistently high demand. On average, one-third of the students in the Middle School were enrolled in one of my classes. The first year I was there, I launched our Computer Science classes. This involved extensive research in different curriculum platforms for Computer Science classes. After I selected CodeHS as our platform, I wrote a proposal to purchase the Pro version of the platform. We also began our curriculum review for Computer Science in the spring of that year. In developing the curriculum, I focused on two key concepts: Top-Down Design and Debugging Top-Down Design Top-Down Design is the process of taking a large program and breaking it into smaller and easier to solve sub-problems, then connecting the solutions of those sub-problems together to create a solution to the larger problem. In short, the concept of “divide and conquer” applied to computer programming. Breaking problems into smaller sub-problems is an essential skill if you wish to create programs on your own. If you cannot do that, it becomes incredibly difficult to figure out where you should start working on the problem. My curriculum at RIS spent considerable time exercising the skill of identifying the large problem, its sub-problems, and their sub-problems. I also taught the students to think about how best to define the boundaries of a given problem. These exercises equipped my students with the skills needed to design a computer program. Debugging Debugging is the process of removing defects from software. It is an incredibly challenging task, and according to a variety of studies conducted of professional programmers over the last forty years, programmers spend 30 to 60% of their time debugging. It is also an incredibly frustrating process for beginners for a wide variety of reasons, some of which are explored in my master’s thesis. I taught debugging through three major streams of delivery. First, we did regular “speed debugging” activities to start the class in which the students were exposed to the most common typos found in student code and asked to spot them. For these, I used Quizizz to deliver the activity and I tracked the class wide average as a challenge to improve their class’s results over time. Second, I engaged in group debugging of the teacher’s code. This was done to normalize the idea that making mistakes is part of computer programming, and so it is OK if your code has mistakes in it. This helps kids develop a growth mindset that builds confidence in students as they struggle with setbacks and failures across all subjects. These debugging sessions focused on bugs where the code appears to work but is incorrect. Most commonly, these kinds of bugs center around failures to define the boundaries of a given problem or sub-problem. Finally, students were asked to debug code they have not written. This is a common activity for professional programmers, but it also is important because it teaches students how to read code and understand what it does before they start changing it. Robotics The second year, I added Robotics courses, which adopted the NGSS Engineering standards for Middle School. This class was structured around the creation and maintenance of an engineering notebook, which documented the development and design of their robots over the course of the semester. I selected the engineering notebook as the primary means of assessment because constructing a robot is not the primary skill taught in our robotics classes. Rather, the skills we focus on in our class are the incremental design of a solution to a challenge, task, or problem. These classes are structured around a series of tasks which the students construct robots to complete. Along the way, they document the intermediate versions of their robot and code on their way to a working solution. Part of this documentation is identifying the good and bad aspects of how the robot behaved on the challenge table. They then construct a plan to modify their robot and its code in such a way that they preserve the good aspects and minimize or remove the bad aspects. We encapsulate this process as “Build, test, document, reflect”. This approach to assessing robotics is a key part of all major robotics competition programs, including Vex, FRC, and MakeX. Digital Skills In my third year, I developed a Digital Skills course intended to build the technology skills needed to succeed in a Google Based school. This course has three areas of focus. First, it focuses on teaching the skills needed to maintain all the lines of communication they use on a regular basis to collaborate with peers and communicate with teachers. This includes managing Google Classroom, keeping their Gmail inbox under control, and organizing their Google Drive. The second area of focus is general competence in the Google Suite of software used on a daily basis in the Middle School, including Google Docs and Sheets. The final area of focus is basic troubleshooting skills for maintaining their computers (software and hardware). This ranges from how and when to install software updates to an overview of the parts of a computer. As part of troubleshooting, we also covered password management and the basics of cybersecurity. Curriculum Review For our curriculum review, I developed detailed curriculum from scratch for 6 different courses. Then, I researched other CS programs to reflect on what other schools were doing. In the end, I produced a detailed report which was delivered to our administrative team and included a proposal to expand our robotics program and to add Digital Skills to our curriculum. Focus Block Attendance Project RIS implemented daily 45 minute blocks for students to engage in their own projects. Student locations during this time were fluid as the students frequently move to specialist locations to use the 3D printer, access subject-matter experts, or conference with partners working on similar projects. Additionally, there is a content support program that runs during the same time. Students join this content support block if they feel they need additional support with a specific concept in one of their classes or if they need to work on their learning plan before a reassessment opportunity. This fluidity does not work well with PowerSchool, where we track attendance. In order to provide consistent tracking while we pursued a permanent system, I created a temporary solution for the school over the course of the weekend before the program launched. I built a webpage using Python 3 and Django, hosted for free on PythonAnywhere, which provided a way for teachers to check attendance for their students. It also gave them a way to move students to a new room and have the teacher in that room see the student had been moved. Finally, an attendance reporting dashboard was built with limited access which allowed the principals to see a list of all students who were marked absent in real time as well as to see the total number of tardies and absences over the course of a semester. The solution was well received by students and teachers alike, who found it easy to navigate and use. Additionally, the team running our Focus Block was able to quickly and easily manage the location of students and teachers and keep track of student numbers in rooms to ensure that they weren’t overloaded. The solution I built was never intended as a permanent solution. Instead, it was designed as an intermediate tool to track student location while I worked with our PowerSchool Administrator and PowerSchool to learn how to create a plugin which could interface directly with PowerSchool. But as an immediate stopgap, the website gave us a much more systematic way of tracking students during the year required to develop a more permanent solution.

Seoul Scholars International

Rock Band Sponsorship While at SSI, I was co-sponsor for their Student Rock Band. As part of this, I helped with the planning and execution of their concerts. Scholar Dollars Graduation Planning

Eton House Prep

ICT Project Lead This was a 50% teaching / 50% Tech Integrationalist role. In addition to teaching the Computer Science classes for Early Years to Key Stage 2 classes, I was also responsible for computer maintenance and support and for staff training in Ed Tech. Google Administrator I was one of two administrators for our Google Apps for Education workspace. Specifically, I was responsible for handling student accounts during our Chromebook rollout. I also managed Chrome extensions and other components. During this time, I received the Google Certified Admin Level 2 certification. Chromebook Rollout I was tasked with writing our proposal for a one-to-one Chromebook program and then for implementing the rollout once it was done. I selected the Chromebooks, considering budgetary and maintenance considerations, I then drafted a proposal for our business and administration team. Finally, when they arrived, I was responsible for imaging them, setting them up, training teachers on their use, and maintaining them when students had issues. Teacher Training I led multiple teacher trainings on Google tools ranging from Chromebooks to Gmail to Google Docs, including workshops to help teachers prepare for their Google Certified Educator level 2 certifications. During this time, two of my presentations to staff were turned into presentations at the Google AppSummit conferences held in Korea for 2016 and 2017.