LEARNING IN ACTION: GLAVE

 Cedric Li ’24, Anna Grossner ’24 and Mr. Adiletta review graphics for the app

 Pictured left to right: Scott Vergilii ’23, Aidan Flynn ’23, Gia Parker ’23, Anna Rarick ’23, Louka Babic ’23 and Caitlin Ford ’23

Over the last five years, Computer Science instructor and Coordinator of Academic Technology Dan Adiletta has been hard at work developing what he calls an Experiential Learning Management System (ELMS). The program, called Glave, manages three programs at Gilmour Academy that extend the walls of our classrooms: Vector, Senior Project and the St. Brother Andre Service Program. Each of these programs was struggling with overwhelming paperwork that made it difficult to collect, organize and communicate with students.

When he received a visit from Brother Ken Kane, C.S.C., a member of the Senior Project team, Dan knew an app was the solution: “Brother Ken came into my office, and I heard an audible thump when he dropped his enormous stack of papers on my desk. He asked if I could help him streamline the process, and I knew I’d be doing some programming.”

Not only is Glave an opportunity to solve a problem for our community, but it is also a way for Dan to engage his computer science students in curriculum grounded in real-world applications. One of the things Dan teaches his students in app development is to look for ways to take tedious paperwork and a lack of transparency and see if you can ease that data by digitizing and automating it. He also encourages the use of displays to show current status and progress. “It was really a dream scenario,” says Dan. “It gave my students the perfect opportunity to learn while creating something that would actually be used by real people.”

Dan was further motivated by his early experiences with Senior Projects, which he noted “were full of some really cool experiences, but after the project was presented, it wasn’t really shared or preserved in any meaningful way. Glave gives us the opportunity to do that. Same with service hours and service projects: unless a record is taken in the form of pictures, so many of those moments go unrecognized.”

One of the advantages of the Glave system is that it allows students to track their own progress and keep a record of the things they have done during their high school years. “There are progress bars which can help students to see how much they’ve done and how much there still is to do on a host of tasks, and they can receive feedback directly from their advisors and mentors right in the same system.” Ultimately, Dan has high hopes for the potential of Glave to be not just a hub for students’ experiential learning experiences at Gilmour, but at other schools as well. He envisions a network of schools doing service activities and sharing those experiences with their peers. “This could help us bring the social good back to social media,” he says. “It incentivizes virtuous behavior, and, best of all, it is fully aligned with Gilmour’s Mission.”

Recent grad Dom Schiciano ’22 played a key role in the development of Glave, redesigning the “theme” of the app, including the colors, images and logo, and using them to remake the email system. He says his experience working on Glave was invaluable: “Developing software as a high school student gave me real-world experience in what I wanted to do beyond the Academy. It also allowed me to be a part of a project I was passionate about and get it in the hands of real people.”

According to Dom, working on Glave offered a different perspective than typical computer science courses had. “While classes are useful for learning the skills for programming,” he says, “actually working on projects like Glave allows a student to see firsthand what it would be like working in that field. It’s also extremely gratifying to work on something that you know can make people’s lives easier.”

When asked about how he is able to do this on top of his teaching duties, Dan laughs. “I can’t say enough about how open-minded the school has been about the development process,” he says. “The support I’ve received has been tremendous, and they trust me and, most importantly, our students, to do the job well.”

The future looks bright for the computer science program at Gilmour, and Glave will always create more for students to do. “The amount of work involved is monstrous,” says Dan, “but it gives us the opportunity to allow our students to learn to develop software with real-world applications. This could conceivably allow us to create a thriving and competitive internship program pipeline for our students. And if things keep going this way, I could see us hosting an Ed-Tech Conference at GA that would allow us to spotlight the great things we do here. The sky really is the limit.”