UNBC Active Minds is a youth outreach program here on the Prince George campus. The program is designed to provide STEM outreach to youth aged 6-16. Active Minds offers a full range of science, engineering, and computer camps, events and workshops. There are summer camps that run for 8 weeks during July and August as well as one-day events for engineering in October and computer science in March. Between all of that we do classroom workshops for teachers and various other forms of outreach at events centered around youth.
I started working with Active Minds in May, 2021. I kind of stumbled into the position because the team was already full for that summer but one of the instructors withdrew from their position at the last minute. My friend reached out and let me know about the last-minute position that was available because she knew that I wanted to be a teacher and that it would be a good opportunity to gain experience. I completed the interview process and was hired for that summer.
In the summer of 2021, COVID was still around and there were safety measures in place so we ran all of the summer camps online through zoom. The camps are structured so that there are two running alongside each other each week. One camp for 6-8 years old and one for 9-12 years old. There were two instructors per camp. One to teach the activity and lead the lesson and the other instructor moderated and made sure zoom was working properly. We still ran the camps as one-week camps but they only ran for an hour each day because the kids could not sit on zoom for that long. After that summer I got hired with Active Minds to help develop programming during the school year. I was able to renew my contract and stay on each summer after.
The following summer was interesting because we had significantly less staff than my first summer with Active Minds. Because of that, we still did the majority of our summer camps online. Only 2 weeks were in-person on campus at UNBC. We still only did one-hour sessions for our online camps but for the in-person camps we ran them from 8:30-4:00. It was an interesting shift to go from teaching online to `doing an in-person camp. There were so many extra things we had to think of that did not need to be done over zoom and we had way more time to fill with activities.
After that summer I still worked with Active Minds during the school year. I helped plan for and lead one-day events in engineering and computer science as well as make activity boxes around the holidays. In the summer of 2023, we finally ran a full 8 weeks of summer camps in-person at UNBC. It was the first summer this happened since COVID. We also had a full staff to work with which was much better. It was a learning curve to go from mostly online to fully in-person with 24 kids in each camp a week. I was also a coordinator that summer so I had additional responsibilities other than planning and leading camps. I have stayed on and helped with other events and outreach this year as well.
I have loved my experience working with Active Minds for the past few years. Some aspects of the job were hard in the moment, but I am glad I got to experience teaching in an online format and an in-person one. They had to be different ways of teaching so I think that I gained more experience going through both ways of providing the camps. I made so many connections with my coworkers, other staff and faculty at UNBC and the kids who participated in the camps. I was never much of a STEM person in school and these camps and events are all STEM-based so I grew more comfortable teaching elementary science activities throughout the years with Active Minds. My experience with Active Minds has already transferred to my first practicum because I taught some science lessons that I have used in the camps before since they fit into the K/1 curriculum. Working with Active Minds also made it a little easier for me to lesson plan because I have had to plan out activities for camps and events for the last four years.
