Abstract

The following report will detail research conducted during Udacity’s Grow with Google Challenge Scholarship for Front-End Web Development. The work is being presented as part of the “About Us” webpage to demonstrate hard and soft skills used in developing our project, a thematic webpage illustrating who we are, our talents, and where we live. This project employed qualitative research methods using an open-ended survey to gather data. Ongoing skills development, motivation, and the positive impacts of the Challenge Scholarship community on our learning had major impacts on success in the course. The present research offers a degree of self-reflection as Grow with Google Challenge Scholarship recipients. #houston members surveyed are goal-oriented, motivated, and persistent individuals who benefitted immensely from the Challenge Scholarship through the program’s social support, opportunities to practice, and immersion it provided.

Introduction

Our project, “About Us”, began as a way for Grow with Google Front-End Web Developer Challenge Scholarship recipients in the greater Houston area to demonstrate skills we learned in Udacity’s Grow with Google Challenge Course. Our diverse skill sets and expertise can all be utilized to present content explaining who we are and, more importantly, how Udacity and Grow with Google has positively affected us. Udacity’s course aims to have students master web development. In addition, it provides students opportunities to engage with mentors and their peers. The “About Us” project is a reflection of our experiences in the course.

Background on "Grow with Google"

Grow with Google’s program is large (50,000 people) and focused on both Web and Android development. In either program, the stated goals are to learn skills with the intent to begin to enhance a career in IT development. Moreover, the Udacity and Grow with Google communities allows students to engage with Udacity staff and other students. The proposed aims of the “About Us” project are to illustrate:

1. Content mastery
2. Peer networking
3. Project collaboration and presentation

Methodology

Qualitative research methods were employed due to our small sample size, limited to members of the #houston Slack channel involved in the current project. A survey containing open-ended questions was administered to local group members. Case study design was used to create a narrative reflecting the group’s experiences. Conducting a survey or an experiment with generalizable results would not reflect on our goal, to explore how did we “Grow with Google”. Data were analyzed using content analysis to highlight our experiences within the program. Understanding “lived experiences” during the project is critical for fleshing out thematic elements describing our personal experiences and defining who we are. Phenomenology, the study of experience, concentrates on the study of consciousness and the objects of direct experience, ourselves. The ultimate goal of the current project is to deliver a humanized portrait of who we are as Grow with Google scholarship recipients.

Questions

Questions, a few of which were derived from the Project Self Review in Lesson 4 from early in Udacity’s course, are helpful in gauging not just our initial progress but overall development in the first scholarship phase. By adopting Udacity’s questions, we can establish a level of consistency in our reflections and within the course’s scope. Doing that attempts to align the present study with course outcomes and the program’s intentions. Personal questions included:

1. "What skills have I learned?"

2. "How did you apply your new skills?"

Additional questions give another dimension to the prior ones for a totality of experience within the Grow with Google Front-End Web Developer Challenge Scholarship:

3. "What skills have I learned?"

4. "What has been easy?"

5. "What has been difficult?"

6. "What prior experience helped you to understand content from the course?"

7. "How did you Grow with Google?"

8. "What impact has joining a ‘study group’ had on your learning process?"

Discussion

Personal growth encompassed the primary theme our group members discussed; however, growth must be addressed as a reflection of our participation in the scholarship program. Breaking it down into other elements is necessary to understand how we grew in the Grow with Google Challenge Scholarship. To build an understanding of how we grew, our group’s interests, application of skills, what we learned, challenges we faced within the program, how our prior experiences facilitated learning in the course, how joining study groups impacted our learning process, need to be explained. Our reflections illustrate our experiences within the program, along with demonstrating characteristics and themes of students who achieved the program’s objectives and grew within it.

In our small group, Grow with Google Scholarship recipients are highly motivated, goal-oriented individuals. A variety of personal and professional interests led group members to joining the program. Our respondents’ cited desires of having more experience in programming, career transitions, updating skillsets, and seeking new tutorials as motivating factors that caused them to apply to the scholarship program. “[M]ore practical experience” in programming was a response given by a member supplementing their computer science education. Many #houston members already had established careers and education. However, some members applied with the intent to learn new marketable skills, as expressed by respondents seeking to branch out into new industries. Others are bridging their skills and expertise to coding and web development. Group members are applying their skills by helping people meet personal and business goals, focusing on projects they had in mind, and working on challenges such as “30 Sites in 30 Days”.

The overwhelming consensus among surveyed participants was that HTML and CSS were the easiest topics in the course. A member with experience programming mentioned the introductory JavaScript was easy, because that knowledge translated from other languages. Group members largely agreed that jQuery and DOM manipulation were difficult. One wrote that functions in JavaScript were difficult, yet another said that grasping syntax and logic was time-consuming. “Slowing down” while “trying to understand how JavaScript works” was one subject’s response. Consistency, motivation, and practice were recurring themes in the questionnaire. A respondent “decided to stick with it”, with the goal of reading related materials at least 5 times weekly. Persistence was a key element for successful completion, despite more challenging aspects of the course. A subject credited how the course improved “my JavaScript skills by 100%”. Giving and requesting help were frequently discussed: access to the community was essential for members to troubleshoot problems, explain their work, and reach out to others.

Community was a powerful support system for subjects. First, it gave students opportunities to connect with other people, as a means of relating to others, giving and receiving help, and by giving people a forum to share ideas. Next, students noted communities on Slack and the forums provided a degree of accountability. Each subject explained that having like-minded communities motivated them by holding them accountable to the program, by giving them exposure to people with varying levels of code experience, build experience working on group projects, and to be part of a study team. Finally, the overall communal experience meant that students communicated ideas, were exposed to new topics, and utilized the opportunity to enhance their knowledge of technology, professional skills, and networking. Meetups were an opportunity for our local group to become acquainted with each other, discuss our goals, develop a project, and help each other on course materials.

Improving skills, or otherwise branching out into new fields, was a commonly mentioned by subjects. Local participants had a diversity of prior coding experience. A couple reported “no prior experience” to the course, while another subject’s knowledge came from other programming languages. One member engaged static site creation using HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, and Flexbox; another was self-taught who created websites for clients and professional projects. Another subject was self-taught, having learned HTML, CSS, JavaScript and jQuery. In their case, joining the program helped reinforce their knowledge by helping others while expanding their knowledge of jQuery libraries. The goal-oriented, self-guided nature of the program helped local students to build on their knowledge, regardless of their prior experience. One response summed it best: “I’ve been able to put to practice my knowledge in helping [my peers] and that has helped reinforce concepts and give me motivation to keep pushing forward and learn more.”

Conclusion

Strong communities provided the support systems that students needed to successfully complete the three-month Challenge Scholarship. Our group members demonstrated that they grew by being motivated, persistent, and sociable. The Grow with Google Front-End Web Development community provided an effective support system, where students reached out to others. As a support system, we provided for the accountability that helped us achieve our goals of completing the program, applying our skills, and learning about external resources to build on knowledge. Our members are goal-oriented, self-guided people who demonstrated the motivation, planning, and consistency necessary for success. Future research might investigate exactly how smaller and larger communities, e.g., local Slack groups and the community at large, affects individual participation differently. Investigating these differences would yield greater insight to how specific communities play a role in course completion. However, due to the short-term and localized scope of the present survey, we could only furnish details of our experiences within the three-month course. Nevertheless, the present work offers a small glimpse of how #houston grew throughout the course.

Motivation stems from seeing external benefits of the application of knowledge, as well as improving oneself. These benefits are rooted in applicability, the social components, and psychic attributes. The value of what we have learned results from knowing it has practical applications. Moreover, coding is a social activity that connects people. The program demanded more than self-reflection because it was an incubator for our own personal growth. Online and offline communities were often mentioned throughout the course: members of the #houston channel engaged in virtual and in-person meetups, worked on a group project, and some members engaged in local tech events. Udacity Grow with Google Challenge Scholarship Recipients from #houston are active, engaged people seeking to build professional networks while enhancing their skills. Members of the #houston community reflect dynamic characteristics showing that we will continue to grow, learn, and build meaningful connections throughout our careers.