The first week we also had a pleasure to receive special guest speakers from different organizations and backgrounds! Danilo Limoeiro, MIT PhD Candidate and also founder of a startup presented to us the happiness equation. Mariana Soares from BrasilLab (Fundação Brava) and Fundação Lemann showed the biggest challenges in the public sector, Milenio Bus, the winner of HackBrazil 2018, motivated the students with their roadmap and prizes as startup. Nova Escola rocked presenting the challenges in the education sector and Maria Alice, the president of the MIT Alumni Association closed the week with an awesome talk about the MIT Social Innovation Challenge.
Week 1 of the technical side was basically a startup in it’s own right - fast paced and constantly iterating. We’ve been focusing on teaching everyone baseline web development skills and good software development team practices, in an hands-on and interactive manner. With the technical skills of the entire class varying dramatically, we began to undertake the challenge of teaching a class and developing curriculum that could address everyone’s needs. Initially, we began the week with trying to teach everyone the basics and ramp up everyone together. We soon changed this as we received feedback and realized that some people felt too advanced and not thoroughly engaged. By the end of the week, we iterated our curriculum and decided to split the class into two concurrent tracks. With the beginners continuing to learn the basics and the more advanced folks learning more complicated topics, we aim to have everyone learning the same high level software development concepts, but programming concepts more suited to their skill level. Let’s see how this works on in the upcoming weeks!
Outside of the entrepreneurship and technical sessions, we needed to get to know each other!! Great teams are created by getting to know each other first. With that in mind, we spent time every day getting to know each other as possible team members but also just as people. These activities also provided a nice bit of relief from hours of sitting and grinding through tons of material. One of the most memorable activities during Week 1 of the program was our “Teach Portuguese” activity. With Michal and Sarah being the only two people in the room not fluent in Portuguese, we challenged the students to come up with phrases using English words in order have Michal and Sarah easily pronounce Portuguese phrases. For example, “A I E mayo” translates to “E aí meu” The students were very creative, and we all had a great laugh!
Another activity that was very important to getting to know each other was the miming activity. Everyone took two personality tests and divided into 4 groups based on their results. For this activity, each group had to come up with a very short “skit” that describes their personality, but without using any words. However, even though we thought we made it very challenging, the students managed to be very creative and came up with accurate descriptions of their personalities only by acting it out. This activity was very useful in helping everyone know what kind of personalities they have and what kind of students there are in the program.
Besides all those in-class activities and lectures, we also had a chance to have fun outside of the class. One amazing experience we had during our first week in Brazil was the World Cup. Brazil played Serbia on Wednesday, so we ended the class early that day after making a bet in groups. We bet that Brazil is going to win 3-1. Sadly, we lost the bet, but Brazil won 2-0. We had an amazing time. We went to a bar not far from where we live, and the soccer spirit there was amazing. There was a live band playing cheerful songs during the break and after the game, couples dancing Forró, and others chatting and enjoying the day, all in yellow Brazilian Jerseys.
Our first weekend since we started the program was very interesting and enjoyable. On Saturday, we planned a barbeque at our place and invited all the participants. Most of the participants came, and we had a great time together. Some of them took over the grill while others gathered to watch the Uruguay versus Portugal game. After the game, Juliana brought her drone to take pictures and we took amazing pictures. The day went by and as the night approaches, we decided to do group dances. We danced to different songs and learned traditional dances such as forró and quadrilha. One song we repeatedly danced to was Madagascar by Edy Lemond. Overall, we had a pretty eventful barbeque with lots of games and dances.
The next day, some of the students took us to Ibirapuera park, the largest park in São Paulo. Our original plan was to bike around the park, play some games, and watch the sunset, but since the line for bike rental was too long, we decided to take turns to ride Danilo’s (our first guest speaker’s) bike. After that, we played frescobol and tag, took some great pictures, did yoga, and watched the sunset. It was a nice and peaceful day.
