MIT Spokes 2025

Tag: learning-festival

  • Day 65: the late night zoomies club

    Day 65: the late night zoomies club

    Ely, NV -> Ely, NV, 0 mi, 0 ft

    0 miles today, so teaching! Somehow, even though this is the second to last learning festival we are doing, the thought of kids and lessons made me nervous.

    We woke up and left the high school for the library, only 15 or so minutes later than planned. The library, across the street from the middle school, had a nice lawn and a pond next to it. We made it there just when it opened and set up half in a conference room and half outside. This was definitely one of the smaller learning festivals with around 12? kids and one adult. I always like working with only a few kids in a group, since I can listen to them more and ask more questions, as opposed to making them do things. The adult was a new addition. A retired? special ED teacher, he wanted to join for the classes. This made me even more nervous – a teacher would be there observing me trying my best to teach. But it ended up being completely fine. It was actually really nice to talk to him about the lesson and teaching in general, especially special ED, afterwards. Unexpected, pleasant surprise. The kids were also great! I met multiple people, whose favourite subject in school is math and found out about some teenagers have been dirtbiking since 3 years old. Kind of crazy! (We had passed some tracks for dirtbikes when riding into Ely yesterday, so it checks out. Dirtbiking and mountain biking appear to be common hobbies here.) We ate lunch outside, it was a calm and sunny day.

    Afterwards, we let Charles and Ruth work on their 3d prints, which always take longer than expected and this time faced some extra difficulty due to a corrupted SD card (an ordeal that extended into the next day, respect to Charles for not giving up on any of the prints!) And we left Greta with them to blog. The rest were shuttled back to the high school. Joseph and Sarah went to do laundry (and checked out a cafe too I think?). I was going to join a meeting, but due to my poor mental math abilities, missed it by an hour. I did some other work, until the people left at the library got back. Me and Charles (who was awarding himself for finishing the learning festival by procrastinating on his blogs) joined Ishaq for the grocery store to pick up the ingredients for a Thai green curry and some other red type of curry. The grocery store was actually huge and very well stocked, we got all the ingredients, found a basil with all the roots and contemplated making it a Spokes pet and got a huge melon. Then we got to cooking. Ruth also made a crazy amount of sandwiches for everyone for the ride tomorrow.

    The scenery was amazing: us under the bobcats in the evening sun.

    Halfway through cooking Ruth, whose stressed about the unwritten blogs for both Charles and Greta, kicked Charles out of the cooking team and made him write his blog. (So he sat there and wrote his blog.) She also had an interaction with Greta about the blogs, but ended up not making her blog, since she had already dropped a blog that day. Anyways, the meal ended up absolutely delicious and we enjoyed it on the spot, sitting on the ground.

    While not blogging, Greta had gone on a run and returned absolutely ecstatic over the sunset and huge moon she had seen. So, after dinner, we too went to see the moon from the bleachers. I walked around the football field, a place I have never found myself on. It’s a pretty big field.

    Afterwards, even though there were definitely tasks to do, I got a bout of sleepyness, so I lay down on my mat and soon found it impossible to get back up. Not quite asleep, but not awake either, I vaguely remember there was some more evening shenanigans by the awake Spokies – sliding around the hall in socks, maybe a movie? They were suffering from the late night zoomies.

    I later was informed it was the recreation of the trailer for the 1985 movie The Breakfast Club. After seeing it in some part of the editing process, I can say it is a work of art. Keep an eye out for Ruth publishing it someplace. In the meantime, for a teaser, you should look at the original here (link in text: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGuWbVb1210)

    But yes, short blog this time, seeya in a week for one last biking trip blog encounter.

  • Day 47: Birdie needs Sleep.

    Day 47: Birdie needs Sleep.

    Tian (I) woke up today with amazing sleep. Yesterday was a bit rough for me because my mind became very foggy and confused by the end of the ride. It might have been due to dehydration, a lack of calories, or a sudden rise in temperature, but today I’m back, better than ever, for a learning festival day blog!

    Barb (Greta’s relative) made us an amazing breakfast of fruits, croissants, and peanut butter with banana on toast for me. The bread was so good! It reminded me of how much I miss a really good piece of bread. Sarah and Joseph (the learning festival floaters for the day) shooed us out the door in a timely fashion. They were so responsible, and that made me so happy. Honestly, how much we have grown as a team makes me shed a tear. What the people say about growing together might be true.

    We arrived in the Garfield County Public Library in Glenwood Springs in a timely fashion and discovered that we would all be teaching in the same room! Cons: students are distracted by other workshops, and noise can be overwhelming. Pros: Spokies get to see each other run workshops, which builds camaraderie and togetherness. This is our 7th learning festival to date, and everything just ran as smooth as butter. Signups happened, groups were created, and we even tried a new rotation today due to Greta’s suggestion and Charles’ support. The small group size made the rotation work well, and I taught one less session! During my break, I sabotaged joined other Spokies’ workshops. In Ramona’s workshop, I made a Caesar cipher wheel and finished the cipher sheet (I wasn’t sure I could do it). In Greta’s workshop, I made oobleck for the first time and punched it. I was also regaled by Ishaq’s Tour de France talk and became interested in the race. We watched some of the highlight recap together, and I became more educated about the world of professional cycling.

    Ishaq flexing his research
    Amazing space for our 7th learning festival

    The library had amazing facilities and also treated us to takeout lunch. We do love good Asian food and decided to all order from Kedai Pho & Japanese Cuisine. I am always craving Asian food, and the udon did not disappoint. There was a food mishap where Ishaq and Joseph’s meal didn’t arrive. Thankfully, this situation was resolved quickly by the library staff. Meanwhile, Ruth shared some of her meal with Ishaq.

    Ishaq obviously loved the food

    Ishaq and I have a machine learning festival workshop that we perfected over the past seven festivals. At first, other Spokies were skeptical about the fun-ness and hands-on nature of our class; however, we adapted our workshop to be engaging for all ages, from kindergarteners to highschoolers. We started each session with a presentation of how AI is present in our lives through ChatGPT, Snapchat filters, and self-driving cars. Then, we broke down machine learning into three simple steps: data, algorithm, and decisions. The majority of our class included four amazing activities/games courtesy of Ishaq and me.

    Activity 1 trains students as pretend AI models. They are shown images that belong in category A and category B. They are then tested with new images that they designate as category A or B. We reveal what the categories are at the end of the exercise and score their accuracy. We review concepts like data cleanliness and AI’s pattern recognition. Activity 2 encourages students to draw happy and sad faces to train an online AI model. Students get to see in action how the lack of data often leads to misclassification and how difficult it is to produce good data. Activity 3 introduces the concept of unsupervised machine learning models. A pretend AI student classifies the drawings of their peers into categories with no guidance. Finally, Activity 4 introduces reinforcement learning where a pretend AI-robot student is guided by their peers through a maze, with a goal and a bomb. Other students give a number between -100 and 100 based on how the student robot is doing on the map. The student robot uses this number to decide its next move. A positive number rewards the student robot for doing well, and a negative number punishes the robot.

    We worked out so many kinks in this workshop that I believe we have the best version yet. The activities are simple enough to scale down for a younger audience. I felt so happy and not as drained as I usually am after learning festivals. It is partially because the workshops went well; I taught 3 sessions instead of 4, and there were less students.

    After the festival, Ishaq, Greta, Sarah, and I ditched the rest of the Spokies and headed back to Barb and Lindsey’s place, each with our own goals of napping, snacking, chilling, and blogging. I am in awe of Barb’s beautiful home and decorations. Soon, more of Greta’s relatives showed up, and Greta held a baby for the second time on this trip! I could never. We had the most delicious lentil coconut curry topped with mango chunks (courtesy of my amazing knife skills). This dinner was thanks to Barb’s hard work. During dinner, Joseph and Ishaq regaled me with Dragon Ball Z lore. Honestly, the lore was so ridiculous that I don’t know if they are lying to me or not. But, the creativity behind characters born in a no longer existing vegetable planet makes me believe that they didn’t make the story up.

    I returned upstairs for my second serving of food and realized that birthday celebrations were in order for Ishaq. I returned downstairs to converse with Ishaq while everyone slowly trickled upstairs. Finally, I made the excuse of wanting to see what everyone else were up to and quite easily tricked Ishaq to follow me. Ishaq unsuspectingly walked into his birthday surprise. Happy 22, Ishaq!

    Just as I thought the day was ending, we shuffled our way over to the freezing Colorado River. We played man in the middle, a game created by Charles, similar to dodge ball, except that the team escaping the bean bags was in the middle of a square play area. Ishaq took out Ramona with a hit to the face, which frightened Sarah enough to end the game. Luckily, she was fine. The Spokies entered the freezing river and swam along the current. Two pet ducks who were out for their evening swim also joined the Spokies.

    Soon enough, the evening hit, and we were just about to leave when an ice cream truck pulled up out of the darkness. The duck owners were also trying to leave, but since the road was only one car wide, the ice cream truck and the duck owners had a faceoff. Unfortunately, the ice cream truck lost, but Greta and Charles acquired ice cream!

    Well, everyone! Birdie just came into my room to sleep. I have been kicking this poor dog out of its bed for the last two days. That means it’s time for me to sleep too! Cheers to a blog published on time.

    Gentle star to not awake anyone

  • day 42: adiós, amy! 🚗

    day 42: adiós, amy! 🚗

    Denver, CO to Denver, CO — 0 mi, 0 ft

    greetings from the mile high city (and home of the beloved broncos1)! 🐎 this is sarah, back with my 2nd learning festival blog!

    while i like to give myself plenty of time to get ready in the morning on biking days, learning festival days have turned out to be quite the opposite. i woke up about 20 minutes before our planned departure time, quickly threw on my usual spokes t-shirt and black jeans, and headed downstairs to grab a quick breakfast. thankfully, ishaq was taking care of that: he was behind the stove cooking up some lovely banana pancakes! 🍌 i had mine with some jam, but sadly forgot to take any pictures :((

    eventually, the 8 of us cram into our 7 passenger mini van (shhh…), and i take one for the team and sit in the non-existent seat in the middle row. we queued up a range of music to hype us up for teaching—from kanye to disney—and after weaving our way through city traffic, eventually made it to kipp sunshine peak academy, who is hosting kids from the boys and girls club of denver!

    per usual, we start to arrange ourselves into various classrooms and begin setting-up our workshops. while originally in one classroom, joseph and i accidentally break the leg off of a table, and one of the staff move us somewhere else. whoops 😬 (to be fair, the building had sadly recently been caught in a pretty bad flood, which i’m guessing soaked up the wooden tables and made them pretty susceptible to damage). after everyone is settled, we make our way to the cafeteria to introduce ourselves, arrange the kids into groups (usually based on age, if possible), and lead everyone to their first “station.” 

    • our host maud’s nevada mug!!!
    • whoops…
    • our new classroom 📚

    for some reason, no matter how many learning festivals i do, i’m always nervous right before starting the day—it’s probably my life-long fear of public speaking. but, like always, i got into my groove, and things went pretty smooth from there! even if the kids are not super interested in the complex physics and chemistry behind real-life rockets and chemical reactions, seeing the their excitement when we finally go outside and launch them is SO much fun for everyone involved—college kids included (these things go seriously high, i’m talking dozens of feet above roof tops at LEAST!!!) for our 2nd out of 4 groups, we ran into a unique and unexpected situation: not only were they the youngest of our groups (ages 5-7, i believe), a majority of them spoke spanish as their first language. while i took spanish in high school, speaking was not emphasized nearly as much as it should have been (which is odd, since in my opinion, that’s the most important part…): i could catch a few words, but would be too slow in formulating a response (if i could at all—99% of the time i would be too nervous to speak anyway since it would be pretty clear that i do NOT speak spanish at a decent level). thankfully, besides the other teacher who was there helping translate a bit, i managed to snag a native spanish speaker for my learning festival partner—joseph was definitely MVP for this learning festival 🏅

    • prepping the rockets 🚀
    • teaching
    • herding the children
    • go ramona!
    • ishaq’s hat 🎩
    • hi greta!

    for lunch, we were provided jimmy john’s sandwiches, chips, and oj! 🥪 i also took a cinnamon toast crunch bar cereal bar that was of questionable origin: i thought it was the kind that was mostly the sugary cereal with sweet icing drizzled on top and DEFINITELY not good for you, but it ended up mostly being oats with the rare CTC nibble. not worth it 😔 we got through our last 2 groups, and with a little drizzle of rain at the end, finished up our 7th of 10 learning festivals. joseph and i cleaned up the field, carried our materials inside, and took some time to decompress from the day while the others cleaned up their own workshops (MAJOR props to teachers who do this 7 hours a day…180 days a year…) he worked on figuring out some of our routes for the next few days in the rockies, and i texted some people back while giving my occasional input on some of his…questionable course choices (i am a notable member of team anti-loose dirt/sand/rough gravel). i hear rumors of video games in another room (sadly there are only 2 controllers), but eventually we finish packing up the car and leave—this time, i am in shot gun 😎

    • post-lf debrief
    • greta has opened her third eye 👁️

    we came back home to a lovely taco dinner prepped and ready by our lovely hosts—MIT alumni david and maud! it was planned in advance to also be a denver area MIT alumni event, so once the spokies had had a bit of time to relax, alumni started wandering in, food was served, and conversations began. i decided to float around to make the most of this unique experience—suprisingly, this is only the 2nd time on spokes that we’ve interacted with other MIT folks! some notable characters included:

    • a fellow course 7 (biology) alum, who never used his degree except in one instance where he managed a project involving chemistry modeling software 🧪
    • his wife, who was an alum of “that other school down the river” (a.k.a. harvard): we had a lovely conversation about everything spokes, as well as northern nevada! she had traveled through there when moving from the bay area to colorado
    • a guy who went to the tour de france and shook lance armstrong’s hand! i think he was also the same guy who was also a member of the track and field team like me! he was mostly a sprinter, but was also occasionally thrown in as a long jumper. we bonded over the struggles of head winds in jumping events 🫠
    • li (who was there the day before when we arrived), and his daughter! i got to hear about an epic, 15-month long road trip across america he went on a few years ago! he also gave me some recommendations for other sights to see in the southwest—specifically arizona and new mexico ☀️

    to be honest, i always forget that we are all MIT students, not just a random group of college-age kids. talking with the other spokies and alumni about dorms, courses, athletics, and so on really reminded me of that connection. it’s always interesting to get to chat with alumni, too—to see how the spirit of MIT has persisted across generations. even though so much has changed throughout the years, one thing always stays the same—the passion. i think that’s one of my favorite things about MIT: no matter our interests, whether they be in STEM, the humanities, arts, sports…our passions are never taken lightly, and that’s what takes us far. it also makes the people (my actual favorite part) so fun and exciting to interact with and learn from! 💗

    • the fixings 🍅🥑
    • yummm
    • treat!

    eventually, the alumni make their way home, and the spokies start winding down to prepare for a LONG day of climbing ahead. but first, for those of you keeping up with the van recall drama…charles received a call from enterprise during our learning festival earlier in the day with the news that they had FINALLY found a replacement car for us!!! 🥳 so after a collective effort to fully unpack the van, we bid goodbye to charles, greta, and amy as they made their way to the denver airport to switch out for what ended up being the exact same car, except it was silver and a hybrid! her name is TBD…amy jr. was brought up, but i personally veto that—not creative enough. joseph and ishaq made the last minute decision to go watch superman (a 2 HOUR MOVIE) at 10:30pm—i declined their gracious invitation, as i wanted to get some decent sleep before (as previously stated) our LONGGG day of climbing ahead. 

    i went to sleep feeling grateful for the opportunity to (due to car switching that night and repacking in the morning) slightly sleep-in to a calm 8am, at that day’s driver (greta’s) discretion. the day ahead had in-store for us a lovely (awful) 5,000 feet of climbing over 50 miles…i was very nervous, but had resolved that i was going to take it slow and steady—as SLOW as i needed. this would be my first big climb since shenandoah on day 2, which i hadn’t fully done due to cooking myself the day before (because of my lack of knowledge of my lower set of gears…i will never live that down), and concerns for my breathing. what i think i lack for in physicality, though, i make up plenty in what my dad likes to call “mental toughness”—i may be the last to finish, but i will FINISH (which, spoiler alert: i DID!!!)

    • goodbye amy 😔
    • hello new van! name TBD
    • the next day’s ride…

    with that, i leave you to read on ahead about beginning our epic trek through the rockies! see you next time as we cross the border from colorado to utah! 🏜️

    1. beloved by my long-time family friends, the arons! if you’re reading this, thanks for all the lovely comments! colorado has been AMAZING!!! ↩︎
  • Day 33: Decyphering Newton

    Day 33: Decyphering Newton

    Newton, KS -> Newton, KS 0 mi, 0 ft (except for Ishaq, but he had his own agenda)

    After cycling for hours through the plains, fields and general flatness and emptiness the last couple of days, I was excited to exist in civilization for a day. We had a learning festival planned in the Newton Public Library. Newton has a population of around 18k people, all of which I am jealous of, because they have such a cool local library.

    Library!
    The nicely coloured windows lead to the children’s section. (There is also teen section of course, and plenty of computers.)

    We were not there to marvel at the library though, we were there to run some workshops! (Pictures can be found on our instagram btw.) I had some great runs of my Science of Secrets workshop a.k.a. the Ceasar cypher and how to crack it, mostly because we had enough time to do the cracking with a lot of the groups and I got some great questions! One girl also solved the whole worksheet, which was a first.

    I suppose we have never actually given a rundown of what our lessons are, so I can briefly walk through mine. It starts with a discussion about how to share secrets (e.g. with your friends, from whispering to texting to hiding messages and sending encoded ones), I might go on a detour to talk about steganography, but ultimately we will settle on cryptography. We learn about the Ceasar cypher, what keys are, what keys make sense for this cypher, how to encode and decode messages. To make life easier and the activity more hands on, the students make their own cyphering tools (instead of using substitution tables). Then, after getting some encryption and decryption practice, they can choose to exchange hidden messages which solidifies the skills or try to hack the cypher (which is more rewarding, but also more challenging). My favourite parts are probably the discussions in the beginning, then trying to figure out the keys and finally the challenges that ultimately lead to (or at the very least allude to) the cracking of all substitution cyphers, which is pretty awesome! Sometimes I get to introduce the factorial and that makes me happy, but I will also settle for understanding the number 25. Point is, it’s pretty great. Halfway through the lesson, we start using a handout, so there is a more structured way to move through the tasks. I sneakily put some further readings at the end of it, in case someone has a boring summer ahead of them.

    While I was having fun debugging the struggles of communicating in code, Tian and Ishaq had a different quest – go to Wichata, KS to fix some bike problems. That included getting Joseph some gloves. A simple task… Or so it seems… (tnn, tnnn, tnnnnnnnn)

    Here is Ishaq hitting some sleek poses with glove candidates. (sorry Ishaq, these are too good)

    Joseph went with the red ones. Equipped with this information Tian and Ishaq then made the purchase and headed to the bus station to drop Ishaq off, so he can visit his mom. On the way there Ishaq was going to put the gloves purchase into Splitwise (our personal purchase splitting app of choice), when he realised he could not find them. Odd… After some digging around the car, he remembered that he had put them on the roof of the car, while securing the bikes on the back. So they hurried back to the store and searched for the glove in the parking lot, but to no avail. Battling the demons of guilt they got another pair of gloves and headed to the bus station. But then on the highway Ishaq noticed a suspicious red item laying alone on the highway – the missing gloves! Of course it being a highway the car had already passed the gloves, so they did a u-turn and then another one, but then they passed the gloves again, so they did some more u-turning until the gloves were acquired. So now we have an extra pair of gloves and the moral of the story is to never give up on the things you lose. (This statement really did not age that well with more stuff going missing… that’s for another blog.)

    Back to the main plot, the learning festival went very smoothly. Personally, I think it is the best one yet. Small groups of great, engaged kids with lots of joy and questions, it was a pleasure to spend time with them!

    After the kids left we stayed in the library. Charles and Ruth were 3d printing and debugging the printing pens. I was drawing and cutting circles. Tian was eating and making 3d flowers. Joseph gave some well received back massages. Some people visited the nearby cafe and came back raving about the banana muffins and peach chai lattes (which might have taken the top spot in chai rankings or not i don’t know nothing). Sarah did some reading. Ruth started scheming how we can do almost 300 miles in 3 days in Northern Nevada (where there is barely any churches, and too many shrubs). Busy with various tasks, we ended up spending the whole day in the library.

    Ruth biting the pen in a desparate (but ultimately successful)
    attempt to fix it.
    Charles approaching a point of desparation fixing the last pen.
    Tian being cute with a cute flower she made.
    circlessssssssssss
    Ruth scheming
    the back massage that rumour says hits your lungs

    To top it off, our lovely host Janet took us to dinner at a mexican place not even a block away from their home. It was great! I got to try barbacoa and pink lemonade (that was really pink!), Ruth got ramen, which was interesting and did some shenanigans to make her sweet iced tea the right sweetness. Sarah got a huge burrito. I think my braincells at that point were running around without aim, so I got lots of laughs. It was awesome! Thanks Janet and Orvin!

    Acapulco!
    Pink lemonade, not sweet iced tea and pepper in a funny bottle.
    food!
    Ruth transfering tea from one glass to another
    No it’s not the same tea, yes both teas at this point were hers.
    Yes, she did later realise she could just pour it.

    And with that ended our learning festival day. Off to sleep we went! And off to sleep I am going now too!

  • Day 28: it takes a(STEAM) village

    Day 28: it takes a(STEAM) village

    Today I woke up from a deep, restful slumber and felt decidedly like I’d been hit by a truck. Not a big deal–this is basically how I feel every day. I dragged myself up out of bed, brushed my teeth, washed my face, and pulled on my bright red Spokes learning festival shirt.

    I’m often hungriest on our non-biking days, so I walked down to the kitchen ready to chow. I popped a cinnamon raisin bagel in the toaster and smeared it generously with butter. I also found a blender and decided to make a protein shake, before realizing we were out of milk… again. Not going to name any names, but I know who to blame (cough cough sarah). I ended up making my shake with water instead, but it was disappointing and I remained hungry, so I popped another bagel in the toaster. Yum!!

    In the meantime, the first group of Spokies headed over to aSTEAM Village, our learning festival location for the day. Ishaq, Charles, and I played some ping pong while we waited for Ruth to return with the car. We were not impressed by the quality of the ping pong table, but this was definitely a blessing in disguise because there’s no way we would have gotten eight hours of sleep tonight if we’d followed through on our ping pong double elimination tournament plans.

    moments before defeat

    This week’s learning festival was a finale to a three and a half week STEM camp. Most of our workshops are one-off programs, so we are working with a group of kids who has assembled just for one day. Today, however, our kids have been learning and building projects together for nearly a month. Each week, the kids at aSTEAM have a different project to work on. They learn technical skills, like coding and 3D prototyping, in order to solve problems that arise in the project. I’m a big fan of this way of learning and I often wish Spokes had more time to spend with the students we work with, but the mobile nature of our trip makes this difficult.

    • intro to machine learning
    • phases of matter

    During lunch, we love the opportunity to engage with students in a less formal setting, so we usually intermingle at their lunch tables while they eat. With younger kids, I ask them what they want to be when they grow up, and we talk about their favorite tv characters and brainrot videos. With older kids, I ask about their goals for college and beyond and they ask me what it’s like studying engineering and going to MIT.

    I don’t tell them this, but I’ve recently realized teaching might be harder than my normal life at school. Before Spokes, I had no idea how exhausting teaching was. The kids we work with are amazing, but being constantly engaged takes an incredible amount of mental and physical energy. Mad respect for teachers.

    At the end of the learning festival, we went back to our Airbnb to rest for a while. We sat around chatting and talked about watching something (Love Island), but then my mom called!! I chatted with her for a bit, but my eyes were beginning to droop, so I eventually hung up and went to sleep.

    I think all the fatigue of the past month finally hit, because I then took the BEST 2 hour nap, possibly ever of my life. When I woke up, it was time for us to head to dinner, which one of the supporters of aSTEAM Village was generously hosting for us.

    We all packed up in the van (the first time all 8 of us have driven together!) and drove to dinner at T’ähä Mexican Kitchen. At the restaurant, we joined William Wells, coordinator at aSTEAM village; Kevin Martinez, benefactor of aSTEAM and The Children’s Place; Carlos Gomez, president of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce; and all the counselors from aSTEAM village.

    scenes from the car

    Carlos told us about how getting out in the community and volunteering led him to the career path he is on today. He told us that volunteering, in addition to helping your community, also expands your skills, grows your network, and helps you find your passions. Volunteering more is a thought I’ve had marinating in my mind for a while, so I am grateful for the reminder to take action. Kevin told us about his grandmother’s untiring generosity, which he cited as one of the main reasons he is as generous as he is today. Juleese and I chatted about educational disparities and she told me about her work helping reduce incarceration rates in Kansas City, MO. I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to meet and learn from multiple pillars of the KCMO community; I am inspired by their tireless efforts to make the world a better place, each using their individual strengths and passions. It’s reassuring to know just how many great people are out there, working hard every day to do good.

    All in all, today left me with a lot of thoughts about what kind of person I want to be in the world. In many different ways, my interactions in Spokes have shown me how the boundaries of my personal generosity have so much room to expand. Whenever I think of Kansas City, I know I’ll remember William, Kevin, Carlos, and Juleese. I’ll think about the expansiveness of their care for their communities and for us. And if the Chiefs ever end up in the Super Bowl again, I’ll probably give them my cheers.

    post dinner goofies

  • Day 19: Festive Learning

    Day 19: Festive Learning

    Yes, you can stop complaining, I, Ishaq, am indeed back on the blog. Today was out second full day in Bowling Green and the day of our learning festival.

    Keeping it real with y’all, I dont really know what happened today, I was just along for the ride until someone said,”you know you’re blogging today right?” But anyways… it was a successful learning festival with dozens of young minds being molded by our quality teaching and engaging lessons. The setup in the morning was very smooth and the kids were wonderful as per usual. In out machine learning lesson, taught by Tian and I, we had our first ever class perform perfectly on our first activity and all the kids had fun making data to train our happiness detector. Also were able to try out some new extensions to our lesson to teach more about different kinds of machine learning problems. All in all, very successful festival.

  • Day 13: Hazardous Challenges

    Day 13: Hazardous Challenges

    Learning Festival Day in Hazard, KY

    I did not want to get up this morning. We just spent the last two days cycling long distances through some crazy mountainous terrain and heavy downpours. That’s not even mentioning the nasty crash I had on our day leaving Roanoke (Day 8) in which I probably fractured a rib! I was, shall we say, pooped. We had a learning festival today which started at 10, so I had no choice but to painstakingly make my way down the stairs of the Harmony House BnB to the breakfast table, all the while my knees were weak and my arms were heavy 😔. Ishaq’s bike had broken down the day before (he stopped being able to shift gears), so he had to drive two hours one way to get to the nearest bike shops in Lexington, KY. We decided he would drop all of us off at the learning festival site, the Challenger Learning Center, and then he would leave Tian to run the Machine Learning workshop alone while he got his bike fixed.

    Our host Sherry cooked us a tasty casserole for breakfast, but Sarah, my bottle rockets workshop partner, thought her nut allergy was acting up even though the food didn’t have nuts. She took some Benadryl to prevent an allergic reaction, but it also made her super drowsy as a result. This all meant that Sarah was also out of the picture for bottle rockets and I would be running it solo. I was a little worried. This was going to be my first learning festival without kids from a correctional facility (we didn’t do an official bottle rockets workshop in Tazewell), and there was a variety of kids of all sorts of ages from kindergarten to 9th grade that we had to attempt to cater to in separate groups. I didn’t think our curriculum was advanced enough for the older kids, so finding out I had to run it solo all of a sudden gave me some anxiety.

    I had a job to do, so I tried to set aside my worries and embrace my life philosophy of ignoring any fear and embracing adversity, or as us kids like to say, “F**k it, we ball”. I started off with the youngest group of kids and the kids progressively got older as the day went on. The first two workshops went amazingly. I was able to keep the kids engaged for the entire hour and they had a lot of fun launching the rockets. With the last two groups, however, my curriculum fears were realized. I blasted through the lesson too quickly because it was so simplified and when we all went outside to launch rockets, the kids weren’t as excited, and it seemed like a lot of them had even done bottle rockets before. In comparison, I launched my first bottle rocket a month ago! I had pretty big gaps in time between the end of my lesson and the transition time, so I initiated my last-ditch strategy of hypersocial activity. I talked with the kids about a variety of subjects, like what their aspirations and plans were, college stuff, what life was like for them, if they wanted to stay in Kentucky, etc. And it worked! My workshop may not have been engaging enough for them on its own, but hopefully they took something away from all of my talking.

    Most of the other workshops ran pretty smoothly, except for 3D Printing… it’s definitely the most logistically difficult workshop to run, since Charles and Ruth run prints for all of the kids. For those that don’t know, 3D printing is a time-intensive process, and having to give 40+ kids each their own prints is super difficult. I know Charles stayed up late the night before troubleshooting the printer and the two of them spent over an hour after the last workshop ended trying to give kids their printed objects, but not everyone ended up getting their stuff. This process is still definitely a work in progress, and I hope they can find a solution to this that’ll leave everyone happy.

    • Me helping a kid prepare the bottle rocket
    • Bottle rocket go boom
    • Tian teaching the chlidren
    • Greta being engaged in her own activity
    • Charles showcasing the POWER of 3D printing

    After all the workshops ended, we were given a tour of the Challenger Learning Center, and its actually amazing. They run simulated space missions where a classroom of kids has to work together to ensure the mission is a success, with a level of detail and complexity that mirrors a REAL space mission. I love stuff related to exploring space, so I feel a great sense of appreciation for the amount of work that the staff have put into immersing kids into a SPACE MISSION of all things. WHERE WAS THIS WHEN I WAS YOUNG????

    • Us being shown the Mission Mars activity
    • Ruth learning how to operate a robotic arm (her thesis was on this btw)
    • Ramona being the master communicator
    • The awesome mission control room

    Afterwards, they took us to an exhibit space where they had a 1/10 scale model of a rocket and a bunch of cool demos and games for kids to check out. We spent way too much time having fun in this space.

    • Us playing around in the exhibit
    • Ruth playing a game
    • Me setting a new high score in the game
    • Sarah crashing a plane in Microsoft flight simulator
    • Ishaq the astronaut

    We eventually got back to the BnB where we were catered some delicious Italian food, all provided by the CLC! We all sat down at this dinner table, and I kid you not, we sat eating and chatting for five hours. The conversations just kept going and going and going and going. Those are the kind of moments I live for.

    Tomorrow is my driving day, so I get more rest haha (it was genuinely one of the most stressful days of the trip for me, off-roading for over an hour in the Pacifica after avoiding a flooded road hit different). See you guys in my next blog, where we cross into Illinois and I can finally talk about a cycling day!!!!

  • day 10: be my baby 🐣

    day 10: be my baby 🐣

    Learning Festival Day in Tazewell, VA

    yo yo YO!!! sarah “schmitty” schmitt is BACK again, this time from the learning festival perspective! 🧪

    for our 2nd learning festival, we are near the northern virginia border in the lovely town of tazewell, specifically the main street united methodist church! since i was the driver yesterday, and was (not supposed to, at least) run my learning festival today, i had plenty of time and energy to spare to prep for a high quality blog post.

    our lovely home for the past 2 days, the main street united methodist church!

    i started my day bright and early at 7:20am so that i could shower and hit the cafe across the street i had been eyeing on apple maps since the day before, “the well” coffee shop on main street. i got my 4th iced chai latte of spokes (yes, i am counting), as well as a bacon egg and cheese on an everything bagel 🥯 i brought my laptop with the intention of doing work, but my hands ended up being too greasy (and maybe i was being a little lazy, too) 🙂‍↕️ at some point, joseph pulled up and copied my exact order. i know i have good taste, but it doesn’t hurt to be a little original…🤷🏼‍♀️

    around 9am, we made the treacherous, extensive journey of a few hundred feet back to the main building to start helping our teammates set up for their respective learning festival activities. for those of you who don’t know, when we were planning for spokes, we split up into 5 groups (some pairs, some not) to make 5 separate lesson plans. learning festival coordinators pick 4 of our lesson plans they want to run, and the 5th person/group ends up as “floaters” to help with overall flow. spokes 2025 lesson plans are:

    • sarah/joseph: diy bottle rockets via the baking soda and vinegar reaction 🚀
    • greta: states of matter, with melting ice and “oobleck” (a “non-newtonian fluid”) 🧊
    • ruth/charles: 3D printing + pens 🖊️
    • ramona: cryptography via simple caesar ciphers 🕵🏼‍♀️
    • tian/ishaq: machine learning and AI 🤖

    for this learning festival, me and joseph were the floaters. not going to lie, it was nice to be pretty much brain dead for a few hours and just have fun with the kids. they all came in around 10am, and they were of all ages, from just graduating kindergarten to entering/already being in HIGH SCHOOL!!! we usually won’t have this wide of a range, so MAJOR props to my fellow spokies for adjusting their learning festivals to fit each age group. imagine trying to teach machine learning to 6 year olds…😀

    • charles and ruth hard at work at the computers
    • science of secrets!
    • machine learning and AI ooo
    • states of matter w/ greta! this got SOOO messy…

    anyways, after some conversations with some of the parish adults, they eventually realize that the bottle rocket learning festival activity was in fact NOT powered by firecrackers, and are DYING to run it for the kids. since we are all for the kids, joseph and i spend the next 30 minutes scrambling our materials together (including vinegar generously donated by the church) in order to run the rockets during lunch.

    lunch (also generously provided by the church) consisted of corn dogs, watermelon, carrots and ranch, chips, s’mores, and cookies!!! 🌭🍉 plus asian food(?) for our resident vegan and non-pork eaters tian, ishaq, and ruth, respectively. during the 2nd half of lunch, we took each of the 4 age groups out in shifts to watch the bottle rockets. i’m SO glad we were able to do so—the excitement and smiles on some of these kids’ faces were SO worth it. truly a reminder of why we do what we do!!! 💗

    screenshot from a video taken of our bottle rocket demonstration for the K-3 age group!

    once the final kids left around 3:30pm, it was time to clean and CRASH. i hadn’t biked the ~70 mile route the day before, and didn’t fully run my learning festival today, but i was still EXHAUSTED. even after (kinda) repacking the car and hosing down the now very colorful tarp with greta from her states of matter learning festival, the day was STILL not done. to keep a long story short, i made a quick, non-serious visit to the hospital the night before to get a prescription for some steroids i might need in the future (in case i get more sick than i already am, because asthma is forever the bane of my existence and destroyer of my happiness), and i still needed to pick the pills up at the pharmacy. so, i decided to tag along with and help joseph on his laundromat run 🧺

    1 bottle of prednisone and detergent, 68 quarters, and 3 bags of laundry later, greta, ruth, and ramona arrive with cheese bread from the italian place a block (ok, maybe a block is generous, another few hundred feet?) away. ramona had come earlier and commandeered 1 of my quarters (consensually) for a piece of gum, but she helped put laundry (which she calls “laudry”) in bags, so we’re even. eventually, the group makes it over to the ice cream joint attached to the italian place, and we all get a sweet treat of some kind, whether it be ice cream or float, kindly paid for by our learning festival main point of contact, theresa! after hearing a few of us left our towels at another host’s place, she also bought new towels for ALL of us. so sweet 🥹💗

    • tarp
    • laundry
    • cheese bread! 🧀

    when we return, tian is taking a nap, but the energy is HIGH in the kitchen as charles and ishaq are preparing to cook all of the breakfast food provided by the church for our stay. pancake batter is being mixed, biscuits are in the oven, and bacon and eggs are on the way 🥞🥓🍳 i added some extra hershey’s chocolate to my raspberry “rocky road” ice cream (that doesn’t contain nuts!), and got started on my blog. as of writing these sentences, half the group is on a sugar high from the sweet treats; there’s music and singing coming from the cooks hard at work in the kitchen; route planning, blogging, and 3D printing is occurring all at once in the dining room; some (one is) are snoozing upstairs in sleeping bags on the floor; most (everyone else) are eating in some way shape or form. THIS is what spokes is all about!!! 🥰

    • ishaq and charles hard at work
    • biscuits
    • pancakes and bacon
    • eggs
    • my attempt at a 0.5
    • sing greta! ishaq is trying to hide his amusement

    after washing a mountain of dishes to a spotify playlist ishaq searched up called “songs white girls get turnt to” (as a white girl, it was quite alright), ruth dragged everyone into the living room to finally watch a movie, which we had been discussing doing for a few days now. it wasn’t until i sat down in a chair that i realized we we’re watching a horror movie.

     i.

     HATE. 

    horror movies. 

    but, for the sake of team bonding, i decided to stick around to watch “barbarian,” even if i watched 90% of it with my hands covering my eyes and ears as much as possible, and my body half turned away from the screen. after it ended, ishaq started ranting about the genre of horror, symbolism, etc., but my elbows were sore from cowering for 2 hours straight, and i was just glad it was over. he tried (for the 2nd time since staying in tazewell) to jumpscare me, and (for the 2nd time) i hit back. not sorry. i made ruth follow me to the bathroom that was 10 feet away from where we were all sleeping because i was scared of being alone. 2/10, not doing this again out of my own freewill. sorry guys. musical next time? 🎶

    never. again.

    i brushed my teeth, got some of the last bits of sugar out of my system by carrying ruth around and (simultaneously) attacking ishaq, sorted some of my laundry, and FINALLY laid down. we’ve only been on spokes for about a week and a half, but it’s already felt like a month. a single day feels like a few days all wrapped into one. it feels like spokes will last forever, but even between the early rises, sore legs, itchy bug bites, hilly rides, and exhausting learning festivals…i wish it did. 

    on that note, i am finishing up this blog the next morning, and i really got to get ready to bike to breaks. see y’all next time for…(checking the spreadsheet)…our rest day in bowling green, ky! 💚

    yours truly,

    “schmitty”

    P.S. to respond to ramona’s slightly antagonistic statement at the end of her last blog (the one right before this one), i finished this (my day 10 blog post) at 9:25am on day 11, so i would say i was pretty timely this time around :)) love u ramona tho!

  • OFFICIALLY DAY 1 (crazy ik, we’re in natural numbers now)

    OFFICIALLY DAY 1 (crazy ik, we’re in natural numbers now)

    Wow, the past days have been crazy! I was so busy making it through them that this blog has been delayed… for 4 days. Sorry about that! But let’s get into it!

    I am honoured to declare that as of this day, the Spokes 2025 trip has OFFICIALLY STARTED!

    Ishaq and our car in the morning!

    Yesterday all eight of us Spokies convened in Washington DC. And after a long night of preparation and not enough sleep, we woke up at around 5:30am convincing ourselves to conquer our first day. On the agenda was a learning festival in the Department of Corrections Correctional Treatment Facility (I’ll just say DOC) and Youth Services Center (YSC). For the morning part, we split up – me (Ramona) and Greta went to DOC to later join the rest of the group at YSC. At DOC we met up with Judge Faruqui, Ms Reason, Fiona and Brie and headed in.

    My learning festival supplies!

    We were greeted by Judge Faruqui and Fiona and Brie, before meeting Ms. Reason, who came to let us in the facility. To enter you go through something similar to airport security, except no electronics for us and some additional metal doors. Luckily all of our learning festival supplies made it through! Greta was teaching a workshop on phases on matter and I did one on cryptography. (We should each write about our lessons in detail in these blogs at some point! Would you like to hear more about that?)

    After securing our way in, Ms. Reason took us through a series of locked doors. At that point, I started to realize that I was in a real jail and question what was I even doing here. I mean I knew what I was doing, but the lack of sleep and actually being in there felt surreal. It was clearly a high security place, with one goal – to keep people from leaving.

    But turns out there is more to it. We got to visit a unit that stands out. The YME unit, YME standing for Young Men Emerging, is all about learning, improving and working on yourself while incarcerated. We got to hear about their routine, packed from waking up to going to sleep and how the program has impacted them. I can say they were determined, insightful, brave and humble. A tight knit community with the common goal of improving themselves. I was incredibly grateful to be able to hear from the young men in the YME unit.

    Afterwards we set out to do our learning festivals. I set up a table for my intro to cryptography through the Ceasar cypher activity. It was super cool to see the students engage with what I had prepared. There weren’t many students, so we could do a lot of questions and answers, and, in addition to encrypting and decrypting practice, we also did sending encrypted messages to each other!

    Afterwards we headed to YSC, went through security, took a lunch break (with pizza!) and ran all five of our activities on rotation for 3 more class periods. It was a rollercoaster, some students were super engaged, others were tired and the teaching was not without its difficulties, but we made it through!

    This would probably be the place to give a huge thank you to Judge Faruqui and everyone at DOC Correctional Facility and Youth Services Center that helped make this happen!

    Around 3:30pm we were ready to head out. Next up on the agenda were a bunch of errands. But, first, we took a snack/drink break at Union Market. Nicely AC-ed area of cafes, food and a water fountain.

    Us at Union Market

    Then 7 of us in our 7-seater took in some DC vibes and sights as Joseph skillfully weaved through narrow lanes of terrible DC traffic. We went to the car rental company to get some formalities done and to avoid crazy expensive parking, pulled up in an alleyway. I got left to guard the car. Now, you would think nothing much happens in an alleyway in 45 minutes or so, but 3 people came to park or unpark their cars and 2 people wanted to pass through. So I, who had never driven an automatic car, was left to maneuver around our Crysler Pacifica, equipped with a bike rack for added difficulty. I survived. The car survived. The alley also survived. I felt ready to take on the world.

    Me in a car in the alley

    Then, a brief venture to get propane and gas later, we finally got back and it was already late. Tian cooked a lovely dinner of pasta for dinner in our Airbnb (thanks Lawlers!) that just hit the spot. And I spent a long evening of trying to make my brain work, packing and setting up our bikes. At this point I was starting to wonder when the next day of reasonable number of hours slept will be. But we made it through! So, excited, tired and a little scared, we went to sleep to set out on our bikes the next day..

    Dinner ❤

    Editor’s note: I cannot believe I actually finally wrote this! Hope you enjoy 😀

  • Day -18: First Learning Festival 🥳

    Day -18: First Learning Festival 🥳

    Hellooo Spokes friends and fam! Today is May 18th and Spokes 2025 officially begins in…

    1749128400

      days

      hours  minutes  seconds

    until

    SPOKES 2025

    I say “officially”, because while we haven’t yet hit the road, all the Spokies have already been hard at work. We’ve spent the fall, winter, and spring putting in all the behind the scenes hours needed to bring Spokes to life. Countless emails, a couple giant spreadsheets, and one popping WhatsApp community later… the finish (start?) line is in sight!

    This past Wednesday, Charles, Joseph, Ishaq, and I got the chance to take two of our workshops for a test run at Carbone Hall, a juvenile detention facility and high school in Framingham, Massachusetts.

    Charles, Joseph, Ishaq, and I walking into Carbone Hall
    Ishaq setting up for the Phases of Matter workshop

    Charles and Joseph ran our Bottle Rocket learning festival, which teaches the basic engineering principles needed to make a large object defy gravity. At the end of the workshop, the students launch a rocket of their own by harnessing the chemical reaction between baking soda and vinegar.

    While liftoff wasn’t successful this time around, science and engineering are all about learning from our failures, right?

    Speaking of which… instead of studying for my thermo final, I taught our thermo-inspired learning festival with Ishaq! Our Phases of Matter workshop walks students through the properties and molecular structure of solids and liquids, the (super cool) process of phase transition, and what happens when a material doesn’t follow the rules. In more exciting terms, we competed in an ice cube melting race, created molecules out of marshmallows, and, of course, made oobleck!

    Luckily, Ishaq and I took our learning festival for a test run the night before because our food dye ratios were… well.. a bit generous. Luckily my blue hands didn’t scare away any of our students (or their teachers 😅). Lots to learn still!

    one drop of blue food dye is enough…

    On the topic of teachers, we’re so grateful for Carbone Hall principal Thomas Guarente, who made this learning festival possible. We’re also thankful for all our students for being awesome and engaged, Ms. Gabbie and Paul for giving us great feedback on the first iteration of our workshops, and all the staff who made us feel so welcome at Carbone Hall!

    With our first learning festival under our belts and finals almost done, Spokes is really starting to feel real. I’m so excited to share our workshops with more students and to get some pavement under our tires. Stay tuned for a team intro post coming soon and a whole summer of adventures ahead!

    Peace out! ✌️

    Greta:)