The Feedback Loop

Kenny Ma ( LinkedIn ) interned with Floop from Dec 2019 - Sept 2020, working as a Program Manager (PM) & UX Intern and then a Software Engineering (SWE) intern on improving Floop’s onboarding experience.  He is a sophomore studying Computer Science at the University of Washington graduating May 2023, after which he will be looking for opportunities in software engineering and product management. We loved working with Kenny because of leadership, self-awareness, and self-advocacy. Learn more about what Kenny accomplished in his internship with Floop. Kenny is a fast learner and impactful contributor in both individual and leadership roles. At Floop, Kenny excelled as both a Program Management intern, helping his team consistently meet milestones with high quality, and as a Software Engineering intern, driving his own learning and projects to develop features end-to-end. With his keen sense of self-awareness coupled with self-advocacy, Kenny will continue to grow and thrive in wh...

Silvia Calinov ( LinkedIn ) interned with Floop from June - September 2020, working as a Program Management intern on our feature development process. She is a junior studying Industrial Engineering at California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo graduating June 2022, after which she will be looking for opportunities in industrial design. We loved working with Silvia because of her focus on user needs, openness to feedback, and collaboration. Learn more about what Silvia accomplished in her internship with Floop. Silvia brought her expertise in Industrial Engineering to her Program Management internship at Floop, analyzing our company’s needs to redesign our operation processes. During her internship, she demonstrated initiative to improve her work from feedback and sought creative opportunities to collaborate with team members across functions. Silvia was a joy to work with, and the tools she created have streamlined our operations and saved our team valuable time. Top Acco...

Kevin Ruiz is a senior at Cleveland STEM High School and a marketing intern at Floop.  Should we have tests in virtual learning? “We will have a test tomorrow.” Is the last sentence any student wants to hear, now imagine hearing that you have to take a test from home, but the question for teachers is how will we have students take tests from home or even evaluate how much they are learning from home. I’ve always been a student who doesn’t like studying or preparing for tests, but when you get that test back and you see that A or 100/100, it’s one of the best feelings in the world, but at times there are those bad tests. In this virtual learning environment, we as students and teachers have to figure out what is the best way to have students take tests when we are learning from home. I feel we could have many ways to loop around the struggles of taking a test from home. I would prefer no tests but I still feel like there needs to be something where we could be evaluating our learnin...

Kevin Ruiz is a senior at Cleveland STEM High School and a marketing intern at Floop.  Self Grading    This blog was created with the help of Mark Barnes , a well-known person in the teaching industry and founder of Times 10 Publications . I asked him a few questions regarding self-grading and he gave me some very good responses, so I would like to thank him for that. Now onto the blog. Self-grading is when a student self assesses an assignment or test and they evaluate how they think they did on the assignment. For self-grading to work, both the students and teachers have to understand what it takes for self-grading to work and benefit both sides. As a student who has been asked to self assess, I always tried to be as honest as I could with myself, and occasionally there had been times where maybe I gave myself a better grade than I deserved. I also noticed other students grading themselves much higher than what they knew they deserved. Soon enough the teacher in our sc...

Kevin Ruiz is a senior at Cleveland STEM High School and a marketing intern at Floop.    The success of peer learning groups Having your students build relationships and teaching them how to interact with others is a great skill. In the real world we may be put with others to work on a certain project or we may just have to interact with others in general at work. So, making sure students are constantly learning and practicing these life skills is important. This summer I was involved in a program at Seattle University, it was a business program for students all over the country and even some international students, and mainly no one knew each other. We were all given the task of creating a business with real-life numbers and scenarios, but we would have to do it with a group of students we didn’t even know and all of it would be done through Zoom meetings. Along the way, we had a college counselor to help us with anything we needed and to help us be more communicative with on...

Kevin Ruiz is a senior at Cleveland STEM High School and a marketing intern at Floop. My experience In early March I was in the middle of soccer practice when we found out school would be suspended for one day so it could be cleaned out and disinfected in case Covid-19 had been in the building because there had been a reported case of someone coming in contact with a person with COVID, but then one day became 2 weeks then 2 weeks became 2 months and next thing you know the school had been suspended for the rest of the school year. All the students were thinking was how will we learn or go to class now? How will teachers grade us? Will we even go back to class, all these questions started coming up for us with no immediate clear answers, Then all of these apps started coming up, apps that were made specifically for online interactions and could hold many people in a virtual environment for like a class. Wow perfect am I right. In my case my school used Microsoft Teams to hold office hou...

To all teachers and students reading this, I’m Kevin Ruiz a rising senior at Cleveland STEM high school, starting the first week of September I'll be starting my senior year, and with that comes lots of excitement but also disappointment that we won't get to start our senior year being in school with our classmates but we still have virtual learning and with that comes a lot of new experiences and difficulties but I will lead you guys through a collection of blogs that talk about what we as students will need when it comes to our situation from a high school seniors perspective. Building Relationships at the Start of Remote Learning At the beginning of the year, us students always find ourselves doing icebreakers to learn our classmates and over the years you slowly know everybody in your high school, by senior year you probably do know everybody so the ice breakers become useless at some points, but usually we were never really able to establish a great relationships with the ...

This summer my entire faculty read Grading for Equity  by Joe Feldman. This book is packed with research and also addresses and respects the sensitive nature of discussing grading. He does a great job of answer teachers most common questions and concerns about grading reform, like 'If I stop grading homework, won't they stop doing it?' Here are my reading notes: Assumptions About Grading to Throw Out Grades are mathematical and therefor objective - refuted by looking at grading variance within a single school Intellectual ability falls on a bell curve, and so should student grades within a course - refuted by growth mindset research Students are effectively, extrinsically motivated by external factors like grades - refuted by research by Dan Pink and others that shows that extrinsic motivation only really works for menial tasks. Pillars of an Equitable Grading System Accurate - does the grade reflect what students know, and not their behaviors Bias-Resistant - our practi...

Floop stands in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. We are horrified by the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, Elijah McClain, and countless others at the hands of police. We condemn the racial hierarchy that existed before the founding of this country and enforced by this country’s history of racist policies, from slavery, segregation, and our modern era of mass incarceration and policing that disproportionately harms Black people and communities. We are heartbroken at how these wider policies of oppression persist in our education system, through our curriculum, assessment policies, tracking, and discipline processes. But we are also heartened by the renewed attention and support of Black Lives Matter and are committed to doing our part to dismantle the racial hierarchy. Support Black Lives Matter Up to this point, we have been quiet on email, social media, and this blog to allow more important voices to com...

I tell an abridged version of this racial awakening story to my students to model conversations around race and identity. Being open and authentic with students, I hope, encourages them to be open and authentic with me. I’m sure you have a story of racial awakening as well, and if you haven’t formally articulated it yet, I hope my story can be a useful example. I learned that I was Asian when I was 11. The fact it took me so long to learn I attribute to luck and privilege. Growing up, I believed I was Canadian. My identity as Canadian started with my parents before me. Their stories are so much more interesting than what I can share in a paragraph, but simply, my parents lived classic immigrant stories. Both immigrated to Canada from lives of poverty to be part of the first generation in their family to attend college. My dad had a one-way ticket from Hong Kong to Canada with $500 in his pocket, and he drove taxis all night to pay his way through school. My mom grew up in rural Mal...