This year, the Advanced Computer Science class will host a holiday robot parade and drone show on Dec 21st. The event will be live-streamed on a custom-built website.
One of the class’ focuses is delivering and meeting clients’ expectations with their work. And Principal Jon Fey was one such client. For this project, Fey listed all of his requirements and expectations for the students.
“This is exactly what happens when a company is hired to do a special project. The teams divide into subgroups and specialize in specific parts of it. The amount of collaboration and communication is important so students can work at a pretty high level and high goal to meet a deadline,” said Advanced Computer Science Teacher Kevin Kiyoi.
The holiday parade consists of a robot parade, drone show, custom-built live-streaming website, greeting cards, and a hand-made city model. The class split into multiple teams and worked together on the project. It celebrates four different holidays of different faiths: Christmas, Diwali, Hanukkah, and Eid.
“Some challenges for managing this CS project would probably be communication. For both across different teams and overall collaborating and having everyone work in unison. The collaboration across teams would be very useful in the real world industry environment because in real software companies, you have to be able to figure out what needs to be done in the frontend, backend, etc.,” said Parade Project Manager Evan Tu (‘24).
Following the industry standard development process called Agile, there is a focus on completing and iterating over the project. Students also had the opportunity to learn about agile development from an Amazon manager guest speaker.
“It’s pretty exciting and atypical in a good way where unlike the usual battering of information, you get a real application use of what you have learned especially given its a final for a CTE course. It’s not just about what I know, it’s about what I know plus how can I use what I know. Future course takers for advanced CS will not only find this really valuable but fun honestly,” said Sangeet Barkataki (‘24).
Throughout the year, there have been a variety of projects touching different fields of computer science such as hardware development, app development, and web development as well as soft skills such as presenting and collaborating with groups.
“Somebody asked ‘Are we going to do this next year?’ and I think the answer is no. We’re going to come up with something unique and special each year,” said Kiyoi.
During the past few weeks, the class prepared and rehearsed. The final event will be in the MPR and expects to hold many attendees and guests.
“I’m hoping to see something that hasn’t been attempted. We got a lot of high-level stakeholders that we invited so this is an opportunity to show off the skills of Amador students,” said Kiyoi.
