Community Spotlight: Yamama Shaka’a

This month, we wanted to take some time to publish a guest post from one of our three amazing Outreachy interns, Yamama Shaka’a. Yamama worked with the Oppia Foundation to conduct and analyze a series of user studies with students in her local community in Palestine. Throughout that time, she went above and beyond to bring awareness about Oppia to local leaders and even helped implement a series of improvements to our lessons that she recommended based on her studies. Continue reading on to learn more about her experience being an intern and volunteer with Oppia in her own words.

My Experience Working With Oppia Foundation

In December 2019, I started my internship with the Oppia Foundation. For those who don’t know, Oppia is a platform that provides free and high quality educational content created by educators from all around the world. Oppia has a great mission which is to help anyone learn anything they want in an effective and enjoyable way.

Yamama with a group of students she worked with during her internship.

The most interesting part of my internship was performing research studies with disadvantaged students in Palestine. The purpose of this study is to help Oppia’s team find ways to improve Oppia’s platform to serve these students’ needs. I did the study with the help of Tomorrow’s Youth Organization which is an organization that supports students who live in refugee camps and are identified as being of low socioeconomic level status in my city, Nablus. Most students who participated in the study are disadvantaged with regards to education and quality of life. Most of them also have uneducated parents so they don’t receive educational support at home.

One student completing an Oppia lesson as part of Yamama’s user studies.

I have worked a lot with school students before, but working with disadvantaged students is really different. At the beginning, it was hard to manage the students and convince them about the importance of commitment and respect for time. Also, it was hard to keep their attention on the lessons. Once they got started, though, they enjoyed the activities a lot and, they continued learning. What makes Oppia work well for these students is that they love the enjoyable stories in Oppia’s lessons. The lessons teach students Maths by telling them a story and giving them exercises related to that story in order to show them that math can be used to solve problems in real life.

In addition to performing user studies, I worked with both the local outreach and software development teams to help address the feedback we found in the user studies. I compiled students’ feedback related to the lesson content and platform. I understood students’ needs and suggested fixes and features to meet them. I was part of many discussions on GitHub with Oppia’s designers and developers to find the best way to apply these changes. Furthermore, I wrote requirements documents for new features and I created an Oppia lesson to teach students how to use the keyboard.

One student completing an Oppia lesson as part of one of Yamama’s user studies

In February, some of the students and I were guest speakers in the Technovation Challenge Kick Off event in Palestine. I was proud when my students got onto the stage and introduced Oppia to about 120 students and 20 teachers. They talked about their experiences and how they have been learning using Oppia platform. They were very excited and encouraged other students to join them in doing Oppia’s lessons.

Some of the students who worked with Yamama presenting about their experience on Oppia

I was lucky to have two amazing mentors who helped me a lot during my contributions. They both answered all of my questions. The last part of my internship, I have been working hard on finishing a very long report, and they helped me with comments and suggestions all the way.I believe this is the best report I have ever written because of their help. Also, I am very proud of the research study I have finished. I know that my work has been considered seriously and all of the teams are working to improve Oppia according to my research and suggestions.In addition, my mentors were amazing in connecting me with the rest of the team. It was really a pleasure to work with them.

A student completing an Oppia lesson during one of Yamama’s user studies.

I have learned a lot during this internship. My communication skills through email and Github have gotten better over time as my mentors kept connecting me with people on the team to discuss technical and content issues. Also, my analytical and research skills improved as I learned what kind of questions I should ask to understand students’ needs and think of improvements. I learned how to organize my thoughts and express them in writing.

Working with Oppia was a really great experience for me. I encourage anyone to dedicate part of their time improving Oppia and serve Oppia’s mission.

Thanks again to Yamama for all of her amazing work and dedication to making Oppia even more accessible to the learners of Palestine! If you’re interested in volunteering with the Oppia Foundation or just want to find out more about us, you can do so by going to oppiafoundation.org. You can always check out our effective, interactive lessons for free at oppia.org.