Greetings!

After months of hard work, students and teachers are seeing the wonderful results of the immersive Computer Science and Technology training provided this year by Mouse programs. I am so grateful for your support of Mouse’s work and to the incredible team of educators at Mouse who are driving innovation in learning

- Larry Lieberman, Executive Director

Mouse in the Community

Mouse Design League ASWOW NYC

ASWOW, or A School without Walls, is a new NYC Department of Education High School program opened Fall 2022 offering a Project Based, Real World Learning Curriculum in a hybrid setting.

Mouse proudly joins the students at ASWOW to discover different ways to emphasize and view our shared NYC community. On January 25, 2023, alongside volunteers from the Department of Education, Dropbox, Civics 4 All, and NYC Outward. Mouse joined 60 students at the Brooklyn Heights Public Library to share innovative thoughts for each others’ projects and received great feedback for their current prototypes.

New York City Council

In March, Mouse was invited to present to NYC Council Education Committee hearing on student priorities and budgeting. Many NYC Council Members support Mouse’s work in their communities. We are especially grateful to Council Member Nurse (Brooklyn) and Council Member Holden (Queens) for their recent visits to Mouse’s Design League.

Mouse X Girls Scouts Leadership Institute

Mouse has partnered with the Leadership Institute, powered by Girl Scouts of Greater New York, to launch the Design League program through their STEM track over a 5-week workshop series.

Throughout the past five weeks, we have implemented the Design with Purpose curriculum for 40 Cadette, Ambassador, and Senior girl scout members. Using Mouse Create, students are introduced to the Human-centered design process and professional skills such as User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) design. Our future STEM leaders have gained problem-solving, problem-finding, collaborative, and creativity skills while addressing a social impact issue in our community and gaining empathy knowledge in order to focus on the needs of their target users. Using the knowledge gained, these young female designers built prototypes of original tech projects surrounding themes around Education, Social Justice, Mental Health, Public Health, Homelessness, and Foster Care.

We can’t wait to see the final Capstone project that these future female STEM leaders of NY have put together!

Learn more about Mouse in the 2023 Leadership Institute >

Mouse Professional Mentor Program

Mouse’s Professional Mentor Program provides a pathway for NYC students to meet and engage with industry professionals in the media, technology, design industries, and beyond. Mentors have the unique opportunity to inspire and motivate students by providing insight and advice and sharing experiences from their professional journey.

Mouse Design League in partnership with the NYC Department of Education, DIIT Team is in its 3rd year! This 2022-2023 school year, we’ve connected 47 career professionals to mentor about 500 students in schools across the city.

Thanks again to all the career professionals who volunteered their time to inspire our future NYC STEM leaders!

Learn more about volunteering opportunities with Mouse >

Educator Training @ Mouse

March marks the end of our Smart Start facilitation for the 2022-23 school year! The purpose of the Smart Start grant is to develop, implement, and share innovative programs that provide professional development and support to increase the expertise of the NYS Computer Science and Digital Fluency Learning Standards that were adopted in December 2020 among teachers in grades K-8.

In our most recent sessions, we covered topics such as unplugged activities, the connection between cybersecurity and digital fluency, developing a Scope and Sequence for the artifacts created throughout the program that teachers can use the following school year, and much more. We worked with teachers from Rockland BOCES, Western Suffolk BOCES, and Longwood Central School District.

Up next, we will be running a Code.org CS Fundamentals workshop and an Advanced Scratch Pathway focused on enhancing teacher knowledge and skill with Scratch Programming. During these Advanced Scratch sessions, teachers will gain expertise using variables and conditionals, video-sensing, and Micro:bits in their block-based coding programs. Both of these programs are for teachers who are a part of the CS4All NYC initiative.

Interested in our Educator Professional Development opportunities? Learn more about the topics available here >

Mouse at SXSW EDU 2023

Mouse presented an exclusive workshop at South by Southwest EDU 2023, titled “Problem-Finding Skills: UX, Iteration, & Feedback.” Mouse Directors Sarah Maldonado, Maggie Muldoon, and Senior Director Danny Shapiro led participants through an interactive workshop to build connections between design thinking and computational thinking, in order to prepare today’s students for the jobs of tomorrow. By centering their own experiences at the SXSW EDU conference, the Mouse team implemented human-centered design strategies for designing solutions to problems that exist in their everyday lives.

Participants saw firsthand the value of Design League by learning to frame problems as opportunities for innovation. We shared examples of how Mouse students generated app prototypes that met authentic needs – with no coding required. The presentation also explored a breadth of tech career pathways, centered not just on problem-solving skills, but in problem-finding skills.