Day Two | Steemit Bootcamp for Underprivileged Kids

Beginners luck is out. Time for real work!

Contents for Day 2:

• Recap

• Identifying Your Interest

• In-Class Activity: List down at least 5 topics of interest

• The 4-MAT

• Writing Dos' and Donts'

• Basic Structure of a Good Article

• In-Class Activity: Writing A Post

• Introduction to Keyboard Shortcuts

• Hello Typershark

• Hello ResizeImage.Net

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Assignment for Day 2:

• Pixar in a Box is a behind-the-scenes look at how Pixar artists do their jobs. You will be able to animate bouncing balls, build a swarm of robots, and make virtual fireworks explode. The subjects you learn in school — math, science, computer science, and humanities — are used every day to create amazing movies at Pixar. This collaboration between Pixar Animation Studios and Khan Academy is sponsored by Disney. (Extracted from Khan Academy)

  

Key Learnings:

1. Kids were rather "high" on their success of their first Steemit Posts, but they were quick to learn that it was because of the support of #teammalaysia. They now learn that they need to start connecting and building followers.
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2. An easy recommendation I gave them was to search for Tags and Categories they have interest in, follow the Steemians there and leave a nice comment.
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3. They are also encouraged to make new friends from the #Introduceyourself tag.
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4. The students are guided through a series of questions designed to identify their interest. Since they just finished school, I did a round-robin around the room for each of them to share their favourite subject in school.

   
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5. The students were then given 15 minutes to list down at least 5 topics that interest them, based on the questions above. I went around the room to help them identify the topic to write for the day, guiding them with a process called "Chunking". This process will be explained further on Day 3.

   By the end of the round, each of them was clear what they should be writing about for the day.
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6. Then, I share with them for their articles and posts to be interesting, they must cover the the magical 4MAT - Why, What, How and Call to Action. In summary, the four areas are:

   • Why - What is your purpose of writing the article?
   • What - What are you going to talk in detail?
   • How - How can the readers practice what you wrote about? How can they achieve the purpose you mentioned? What's the process involved?
   • Call-To-Action - What can the readers do after reading your post?

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7. I gave them a simple structure to follow based on the 4MAT, and they are told to elaborate on their points.
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8. I also took some time to give them a couple of tips on writing, such as:

   • Do not write in ALL CAPS, unless you're writing an angry letter to a nasty politician
   • It is totally okay to have one sentence in a paragraph. This is also to reduce long paragraphs and a "block" of text.
   • To achieve a "conversational" tone, and to produce a post that "talks" to the readers, I suggested they try to write like how they talk, to make is read as natural as they speak.
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9. Knowing they will be spending a lot of their time on the keyboard (until the world is more open to voice recognition and dictation), I urged them to learn and memorise common keyboard shortcuts like CTRL+A, CTRL+C etc.
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10. On that note, some of them weren't happy with their slow typing speed, which was why I recommended them to play Typershark. Knowing the kids enough games, I feel that this was a great suggestion.

    
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11. Thanks for contribution of our little artist in the class, @kellychua, we were introduced to ResizeImage.net. It's a free web app to resize, crop and edit photos, without having to install any software.
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12. Interestingly, Kelly asked me yesterday "how to resize images". Because I was with another kid, I told the class, and Kelly, that there is this powerful answering machine called Google, and since they, I noticed they stopped asking me simple questions. They would ask questions only after Googling. Fast learners!

Because I had a business meeting to attend, I only had half a day of session with them today. One of the facilitators helped guided them during the second half of the day, to encourage them to write and connect with more Steemians. Thanks Lucy!

Again, if you want to support the kids, do give them some feedback on their writing, and of course, upvotes would totally make their day. You can check out their works here.

Check out the previous post(s) in this Steemit Bootcamp for Underprivileged Kids Series:

• Day Zero | The lead-up and Preparation
• Day One | Introduction to Steemit, the kids' first #Introduceyourself post, and no way a combined SBD133 of upvotes on the very first day!?!!?
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Wait, why's Mav posting on Steemit nowadays?

Well, unlike other blogging and social media platform, Steemit is the only platform that allows me to earn cryptocurrency when I engage with it. Yup, one Steem is about USD7, and you, too, can earn Steem Dollars every time you:

• Create content (articles, blog posts, podcasts, videos, photos)
• Upvote (like) other people contents
• Comment on other people's posts
• Have discussions, share opinions etc!

Yup, basically it's the very same thing you're doing on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc all along!

The only difference? For once you can earn a nice income on the side!

Sign up for a free Steemit account, and you can thank me by coming back and upvoting this article. And guess what, you will earn Steem too for doing that! #awesome