MIT Spokes 2026

Tag: learning-festival

  • 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:)