🐲 Splashing into Lunar New Beginnings 🐉
SplashCon 2024, join LU, new Chapter Board Chair, web updates, and Splash merch stores.
Happy Lunar New Year, Splashers! This month’s newsletter reports back from SplashCon 2024, announces an updated LU’s organizational structure that you can be a part of, celebrates the election of the new Chapter Board Chair, presents website updates, and provides resources on how you can set up your own online merch store.
✅ tl;dr: LU-wide announcements
SplashCon 2024 was a success. See you next year!
Join LU as a volunteer to make nation-wide impact. Tell us about your interests here or email info@learningu.org.
If you are a Splash chapter representative and would like to join the Chapter Board meetings but are not on the mailing list, please email our new Chapter Board Chair, Haven Whitney (Stanford) at havenw@stanford.edu.
Noticed anything new? Check out the most recent web updates.
The web team is looking for volunteers: join #web-development on Slack or email web-team@learningu.org!
Try setting up your own Splash merch store! Check out LU merch!
🤖 Resources and communication
Check out the LU handbook and Website documentation on Github.
Check out this self-guided lesson planning worksheet.
📢 Tell us your experiences! Spread the news!
Tell the Pedagogy Team a cool class you have taught or seen, your secret teaching tactic that works especially well, or golden moments of learning you witnessed!
Have any news, tips, or comments to share? Email us stories to be featured on our next newsletter, or send us feedback.
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🚗 News From the Road
SplashCon 2024 was a success! See you next year!
14 classes taught by 9 teachers were attended by 50 admins from across 13 Splash chapters! A big thank you to everyone who participated to share ideas, engage in thoughtful discussions, and spread passion; to teachers who facilitated those discussions; and to Hilary Zen (MIT) and Miles Calabresi (LU) for making all of this happen, and to Ted Hwa (LU) for managing the finances involved!
“SplashCon is a wonderful opportunity for large and small Splash chapters alike to meet organizers from across the country and strengthen their program offerings with focused class sessions.” —Aaron Kirtland (Brown)
“A great opportunity to learn from diverse perspectives on how to make Splash even better!" —Stanford Splash
“It was a really great experience to meet up with the greater splash community because everyone was so encouraging and contributed good ideas!” —Marina Zeng (UCLA)
🛹 News From the Board
🕵️ LU Org Chart and Recruitment
We have updated our organizational chart with a few additions, such as Archives & Resources Management—to manage, organize, and distribute tons of helpful resources accumulated over the last 20+ years—Communications—to facilitate better communication between LU and Splash chapters, among chapters, as well as between LU and Splash attendees—and Research—to measure the impact we are making and to develop evidence-based tools to do better. LU drives many initiatives across these committees to support Splash chapters in bringing positive change to education.
And you can be part of that movement! Join LU to:
establish better inter-chapter communication portals
develop intuitive web environments
set up new programs and mentor sprouting programs
manage 💰 to make everything (like SplashCon) happen
develop and distribute resources to maximize the impact of Splash
or work on anything else that inspires you, on your own time! If you have a cool idea, or if you’re interested but unsure where to start, let us know your thoughts here and/or email info@learningu.org.
🎉 Introducing the new Chapter Board Chair, Haven Whitney (Stanford); Farewell to Jackie Folmar (Yale), our former Chair
The Chapter Board is an independent body within LU comprised of Splash chapter representatives, built to foster inter-chapter connections and mutual growth. Throughout the year, they may discuss and share feedback on Splash-related topics, vote to elect a member of the Executive Board, and advise the Executive Board on how LU can better support chapters.
On February 3rd, the Chapter Board elected a new Chair. Congratulations to Haven Whitney (Stanford) on assuming the role!
Haven Whitney is the co-president of the Stanford chapter, where she is a senior majoring in computer science with a focus on systems. Having been part of the program for three years, she is excited to take on the role of chapter board chair!
Our deepest gratitude goes to Jackie Folmar (Yale), who served as the Chair for the past four years:
“I have held this position since my junior year of college until two years out of college with varying levels of involvement, from envisioning Rainstorm alongside the former LU Board at the height of the pandemic to the chaos of the last year as a working professional studying toward a graduate program. While I am sad to leave Learning Unlimited’s realm, I know that Haven’s active presence will make the Chapter Board a more involved and prosperous space than I could cultivate.
Wishing Learning Unlimited all the best in 2024 and beyond! Thank you to Splash and LU for being a welcoming space that changed the trajectory of my life in undergrad. Who would have thought you could plan programs on college campuses full-time as an admissions officer?” —Jackie Folmar (Yale)
If you are a Splash chapter representative and would like to join the Chapter Board meetings but are not on the mailing list, please email Haven at havenw@stanford.edu.
👕 Setting up your own merch store (feat. LU merch) —Julia Wang (Yale/LU)
As spring programs start up, don’t forget to set up your Bonfire merch store for an easy way to fundraise and provide merch to admin teams, students, and teachers.
The best thing about Bonfire is that there are no order minimums! That means you can order a few (or even individual) items at a time, with no superfluous buying and no merchandise lingering in storage. There are also options to ship to individual buyers or to ship everything to one location (good for admin team merch, or for merch pickup at the program).
Once you set up the store, there is minimal maintenance required. Just watch your sales go, while Bonfire takes care of the rest.
Here’s the LU merch store for inspiration (or purchase)! See step-by-step instructions on how to set up your Bonfire store here. And if you have any questions, email julia@learningu.org!
🧙 Website updates from the wizards of LU Web Team
The wizards of web team—Will Gearty (LU), Katherine Brumberg (LU), and Miles Calabresi (LU)—updated the websites last month with all of the great changes that they have been working on since last summer! Here are a few things that we think you'll love:
Increased the color customizability 🌈 of the fruitsalad 🥭 and bigpicture 🖼️ themes (buttons, text, links)
Made the contact info 📒 header/footer sections MUCH more customizable in the theme editor
Added the ability to enable/disable the contact form ℹ️
Added the ability to unassign moderators from unscheduled sections in the Ajax scheduler 📝
Fixed the rapid checkin page 📓
Check out the full release notes on Github!
🕵️ Recruitment alert! The web team is always looking for more volunteers like you! More help means bigger and better updates. You don’t need to be an expert coder already; none of the current web team members had web development experience before they started, and look at all the amazing things they are doing now! 🧚
Anyone who is curious should join #web-development on Slack or email web-team@learningu.org!
That’s it for now! Thanks for reading Learning Unlimited’s Newsletter! See you in (roughly) two months!