The Team

 To begin, I put out a call to a small group of students who participated in both the MVHS Tech Internship Program and the Principal's Advisory Council.  In addition, I reached out to Leonard Speiser, one of our parents and a co-lead mentor for our Robotics team who agreed to speak to the students in case they had any questions. 

Initially, Axel Adin and Sean Murphy jumped on the opportunity, and I met with them on Friday, January 10th to form the team.

After our initial meeting, I met with 3 additional students. They are:
Myra Jain
Claire Schwarzhoff
Luke Stephenson

On Wednesday, January 15, we hosted our first strategy meeting, and the students decided to create a website, work on creating a data set, and begin working on technical side of things. They also created a shared folder to house all the work such as a resource document with various useful data set (ex. California Department of Education's Data and Statistics page), a spreadsheet to track the project, a document to brainstorm the need, and a group text for rapid communication.

What was interesting to me was that the students didn't want to use Slack even though they are very familiar with the platform as they use it frequently for other groups. They shared that they would prefer it to keep things simpler before moving to a platform like Slack. 
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Below are a couple of pictures of them at the start of the meeting. The picture on the right features Axel, Sean, Luke, Claire and Myra (from left to right). We also discussed recruiting more team members. In the end, they decided that it was best to keep the team relatively small at the start and recruit others who can provide specific skills as the project grows.