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How software is created: Team members, tools, and more

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How software is created: Team members, tools, and more

If you’re new to coding, or even just curious about the dozens of apps and websites you use every day, you’ve probably found yourself wondering how applications are built. We’ve got you covered.

In the video below, web developer Pat DePuydt walks us through The Development Cycle — the process through which an idea becomes software. He introduces us to the key members in an application’s creation and illustrates how they all contribute to its development with an adorable example: Kitten Academy. Read on — or watch the video below — to learn more.

The Development Team

Let’s say you’re working for a company that decides to create a website to connect new cat owners with veterinarians who can answer all their questions. This is a huge project that will require various members to contribute to its execution. In this section, we’ll take a look at each of the key members of a product team and the roles they play.

Product managers

First, we have product managers, who Pat compares to ship captains. Responsible for keeping the ship on course, product managers have a high-level focus, oversee the product’s success, and manage its many stakeholders. Product managers supervise the entire development cycle and break its many complexities down into projects that they delegate to project managers.

Project managers

Project managers work directly with developers and designers to make sure everything stays on track. They also help product managers make decisions and keep them from being blindsided by sending important matters up the chain of command. Project managers oversee the creation of complex features, breaking them down into epics that they assign to developers and designers.

Let’s go back to our Kitten Academy example. One of our designers recommends implementing a video conferencing feature into our website. Our product manager will be responsible for overseeing its buildout, so they send it along to the project manager, who breaks it down into smaller projects that they assign to designers and developers. The smaller projects might include building user flows, visual designs, account management features, and reminders.

Designers

Each team member plays a vital role in the development cycle. While product and project managers oversee the application’s progress, designers and developers bring the ideas to fruition.

Designers usually come up with an application’s features and create user flow charts to illustrate how people will interact with it. This phase includes some visual design, typically wireframes like those in the example below.

Developers

After designers decide on the application’s features, developers make them a reality. This sounds straightforward, but even the simplest features can require large amounts of time to create.

Let’s say someone comes up with the idea to include a dropdown list of available vets for each time slot on Kitten Academy. While this would be a great feature, our developers would have to build and maintain a database of KA veterinarians, along with an application for them to sign up and set their availability. This could potentially double the project’s developmental time.

In this case, our developers would explain to our project manager that the dropdown functionality was out of scope with the project’s current timeframe. Our project manager would then relay that information to our product manager, who could either extend the deadline or deem the feature noncritical.

Developers usually consist of a mix of front-end and back-end engineers. Front-end engineers use programming languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create the parts of a website that users interact with. Back-end engineers use Python, Ruby, and other languages to develop the hidden background processes that keep everything running smoothly.

Processes

Now that we’ve taken a look at the key members in an application’s development, let’s go through the processes in which plans are developed and executed.

Sprint Cycle

The sprint cycle involves planning and executing all the work related to the project and identifying any pressing issues. In this phase, work is broken down into tasks, and tickets are assigned to be completed in sprints. Pat summarizes the sprint cycle in five steps in the video above:

  1. Roadmapping: The team decides whether to undertake the project, estimates the length of its duration, and assigns team members their tasks.
  2. Sprint Planning: Team members are informed of the priorities for the next release cycle.
  3. Sprints: Time-boxed periods in which specific tasks are completed.
  4. Backlog grooming: Identifying tasks and issues that had been placed on the back burner but might now become more relevant for the product’s success.
  5. Retrospectives/Retros: The team discusses what they should start, continue, and stop doing in the next sprint. Many teams use Kanban boards in this phase.

Types of tickets

Traditionally, there are three types of tickets: epics, stories, and bugs.

  1. Epics: High-level tasks (e.g., creating user accounts so people can sign up for Kitten Academy) that are usually broken down into stories.
  2. Stories: Subsets of epics (e.g., building user interfaces, appointment dashboards, and pet info storage).
  3. Bugs: Unintended software behaviors that stem from coding issues (e.g., letting people from other countries sign up for KA despite it only being available in the US).

Quality Assurance

To keep from breaking their websites, most teams have an identical copy of its server where they can deploy new code and test its functionality. A developer or QA engineer can then test all the ways a user might interact with the software (either correctly or incorrectly). If the new code passes this stage, it goes live and is implemented into the website.

Throughout the processes listed above, developers use various tools to keep track of tasks and work on code simultaneously. In this section, we’ll discuss Kanban boards, Git, and GitHub.

Kanban boards

Kanban boards are used to visually depict work in various stages of development. We actually use them ourselves here at Codecademy. While completing a Career Path, learners use Kanban boards to keep track of their Portfolio Projects’ progress.

To create a Kanban board, all you need are cards and columns. The cards represent work items, and columns represent stages of completion, as seen in the example below.

Popular tools used to create Kanban boards include Jira and Trello, but you could just as easily use a whiteboard and some post-it notes. Note that the example above is just a model. Most teams have their own ways of building Kanban boards, unique to their own types of tickets.

Git version control management software

Git is a command line software with user interface features that allow developers to track changes to an application. It’s used locally to push up and pull down changes and track them to a remote repository.

GitHub

GitHub is a popular remote code-hosting software. Despite sounding similar, it’s completely different from Git. Whereas Git tracks changes to code on a developer’s computer, GitHub is where those changes are stored so other developers can download it and use it in their work.

As a developer, you can use GitHub to submit a pull request to allow your teammates to review your code and ensure it doesn’t conflict with their own. It also gives them a chance to make sure your code is written properly. As Pat points out, it’s important that your naming and programming patterns match the rest of the codebase.

Another advantage of pull requests is that they help ensure your code runs in different environments. Once your feature is complete and running smoothly, it could then be implemented into the application.

Getting Started

Now you have a basic understanding of how applications are created. The next step is getting in there and doing it yourself. To help you get started, we offer a wide range of courses and Career Paths:

Black and Brilliant AI Accelerator: Meet the Coaches

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Black and Brilliant AI Accelerator: Meet the Coaches

The Black and Brilliant AI Accelerator kicked off in March, and we’re excited to share a look behind the scenes. We’ll share a recording of the introductory session and introduce you to some of the coaches. Plus, we’ll share a sneak peek at what’s to come for the learners in the program, several of whom we introduced you to last month.

To kick off the session, hosted over Zoom on March 15, Tony Effik, who co-founded Black and Brilliant with Perky Noah-Effik, shared the inspiration behind Black and Brilliant — and this accelerator program. “We believe that with the right kind of support, with the right kind of training, and with access to networking and resources, a new generation of Black and Brown people from around the world can enter leadership roles across industries.”

Meet the coaches

The learners in the accelerator program will be making their way through the Data Scientist Career Path on Codecademy. They’ll also be working with a collection of expert coaches to explore responsible AI, social justice, and bias in machine learning.

While much of the mentorship and coaching will be one-on-one with the learners, there will be recordings shared throughout the duration of the program. So feel free to make your way through the course on your own and follow along for video updates from The Black and Brilliant Advocacy Network on LinkedIn.

In the introductory session, we got to meet many of the coaches, whom you can learn more about below. You can find out more about them below. These coaches understand the industry from all different angles — some have technical knowledge, others come from academia, and their backgrounds span everything from AI to data science, research, and design.

Mahir Yuvaz

Mahir Yuvaz has a background in product development and data science. He formerly ran the data science team at RGA, co-founded Topos, and is currently the Director of Engineering at Etsy.

“Data science and machine learning-related roles are still heavily a work in progress in the industry,” he says. “They are not well-defined in some organizations.” Mahir will be sharing his experience in navigating those ambiguities with accelerator program participants.

Yla Eason

Yla Eason has a background in Learning and Development and is currently an Assistant Professor of Practical Practice at Rutgers. Yla joins the AI Accelerator to provide career coaching to participants.

“The hard skills will get you hired and the soft skills will get you fired,” she says. Yla stresses the importance of street smarts, how to navigate having crucial conversations, how to present yourself, and business communication. She also teaches search engine marketing and digital marketing.

Michael Horn

Michael Horn is the Chief Data Officer at Huge, a product and digital experience design company. Michael is also co-author of a Data Practices Manifesto in partnership with The Linux Foundation and data.world.

The manifesto, Michael shared on the introductory call of the accelerator program, “looks at principles as a function of values — personal values, corporate values, and employment values — and making sure that everything we do as data professionals is guided by a code of practices that is defensible today as well as to our future selves when things are not such a Wild West as they are today.”

Marc Maleh

Marc Maleh is GVP Emerging Experiences at Huge. His background is in the intersection of technology and design and he works as an adjunct professor at NYU where he taught a class on designing with artificial intelligence.

Mark is interested in the intersection of humanizing data, humanizing technology, and will be coaching accelerator participants on how they can position the work that they’re doing in their careers.

Nana Essuman

Nana Essuman is the Director of Data Engineering at Condé Nast and has joined the AI Accelerator as a mentor to help participants figure out how to get data into their projects.

Nana shares that one thing that doesn’t get emphasized when you’re a data scientist is that once you finish building your models you need to move them into production. His expertise will help learners get their data to a point where they can start doing feature engineering on top of their models.

Valarie Embrey

Valarie Embrey is a Masters student at Rutgers School of Business as well as a VP on the Institutional Technology team at Citibank. Valarie will be providing career coaching and mentoring participants when it comes to increasing the performance of teams.

Ruth Ikwu

Ruth Ikwu is a Research Associate at Cardiff University’s Center for Cyber Security Research and works as a data engineer. She explains, “60-80% of data science projects are going to be getting and clearing your data.” She’ll be available to help participants with this, along with social network analysis.

Femi Anthony

Femi Anthony is a Lead Data Engineer at Capital One. In the intro session, Femi touched on the demand for data engineers vs. data scientists. “It’s one thing to create the model in Jupiter Notebooks,” he says. “But actually getting it into production is where you need the data engineers — to actually scale and get the model running every day with very little trouble.” Femi will be available to help mentor participants in this area.

Bashir Mohammed

Bashir Mohammed is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Berkeley Lab, working on a postdoc in Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence High-Performance NEtworks (DAPHNE). He’s also an experienced AI and Machine Learning Engineer.

Bashir touched on why clearing and processing data is so important. “Good data leads to good results,” he says. Bashir also shares an introduction to AI and Machine Learning in the 8-minute video below.

Sakinah Adebola Abdul-Ibiyeye

Sakinah Adebola Abdul-Ibiyeye works at Paypal in Dublin and has joined as a mentor to support participants looking to develop projects related to payment, including fintech and e-commerce, as well as cloud security.

Quincy Olatunde

Quincy Olatunde is VP Data Product Management at NBCUniversal Media. While he has a background in programming and technology, he works more on the business side now.

“I’m a product person who understands data,” Quincy says. He’ll be available to help participants take data and turn it into meaningful insights and storytelling to share with consumers.

Alexander Liss

Alexander Liss is Head of Data Science and Analytics at Wunderman Thompson. Alexander uses ML and analytics to turn business problems into opportunities for innovation and growth, and his long-term vision is to use AI & ML for double-bottom-line impact on both social good and business profit.

Alexander shares an introduction to Supervised Learning in the video below.

Tokunbo Michael Hiamang

Tokunbo Michael Hiamang is a data scientist and semantic engineer, specializing in Natural Language Processing (NLP) at Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Cancer Research Center. Tokunbo was unable to make the official kickoff meeting but will be sharing a video for learners on NLP. We’ll share it here when it’s available.

Steve Kaneti

Steve Kaneti is a Senior Data Engineer at DoubleVerify with experience turning research and initial concepts into consumer-facing products in both the hardware space and SAAS space.

What’s coming next?

As we mentioned above, in addition to learning on Codecademy, participants will be diving into topics including UX, Responsible AI and Social Justice, and the Business of AI. We’ll share updates in the coming weeks, but here’s a sneak peek of what you can expect, described by Tony Effik:

  • User Experience: In the world of data science, you’ll need at minimum to present data through infographics and data visualization, but you might also be called upon to work in situations where you are building platforms and applications that require UX design, user research, and creativity. Learners will explore these topics and prepare for working in that world.
  • Responsible AI and Social Justice: We want our learners to be a new voice in the room in the world of AI. That means being proponents of Responsible AI and Transparency, helping the industry develop best practices for the AI industry by reducing systemic injustices and furthering equality. That will manifest in many ways but will include data literacy and equality, consent in user experiences, and ethical practices in marketing.
  • The Business of AI: This accelerator course is meant to serve as on ramp into the world of AI. This workstream of the program will provide all the “cheat codes” for starting a successful career. We believe so much of today’s success is the soft skills and understanding how the business is structured, how it works, and how to navigate, network and collaborate with people in the industry. We’ll help our learners discover the cheat codes and map the business for them.

We’ll be back with more updates here on the Codecademy blog. In the meantime, follow The Black and Brilliant Advocacy Network on LinkedIn to stay in the loop!

Word of the Day: impervious

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Word of the Day: impervious

: not admitting entry or passage or capable of being affected

_________

The word impervious has appeared in 123 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Feb. 18 in “Osaka and Brady, With Powerful Strokes and Zero Pretense, in Australian Open Final” by Karen Crouse:

Osaka, 23, and Brady, 25, have displayed ruthless power in their matches and disarming vulnerability in their news conferences. Their egos don’t appear to be Faberge eggs in need of careful handling, constant caressing and everyone’s adoring gaze.

They don’t pretend that they’re impervious to pressure or act like they are all-knowing. They don’t seem to act at all.

Osaka staved off two match points in a fourth-round three-setter against Garbiñe Muguruza and didn’t panic when she faced a break point while trailing Williams by 0-2 in the first set of their semifinal. She has improved her mental toughness, she said, by talking to her coach, Wim Fissette, and “expressing the nerves that I feel instead of bottling it all up and trying to deal with it by myself.”

Can you correctly use the word impervious in a sentence?

Based on the definition and example provided, write a sentence using today’s Word of the Day and share it as a comment on this article. It is most important that your sentence makes sense and demonstrates that you understand the word’s definition, but we also encourage you to be creative and have fun.

Then, read some of the other sentences students have submitted and use the “Recommend” button to vote for two original sentences that stand out to you.

If you want a better idea of how impervious can be used in a sentence, read these usage examples on Vocabulary.com.

If you enjoy this daily challenge, try using multiple Words of the Day in a 50-word story that you submit to our Monthly Vocabulary Challenge.

How Much Do You Know About Belarus?

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How Much Do You Know About Belarus?

Can you find Belarus on a map? What else do you know about this Eastern European nation with 9.5 million people?

What Children’s Books Have Had the Biggest Impact on You?

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What Children’s Books Have Had the Biggest Impact on You?

What books or authors stand out from childhood? Did any unlock the magic and joys of reading for you? Did any inspire, shape or guide the person you are today or hope to be?

Beverly Cleary, the author of such classics as “Ramona Quimby, Age 8,” “Henry Huggins” and “The Mouse and the Motorcycle,” recently died at 104. Did you ever read any of her books? Do you have a favorite book, series or character that she created?

In third grade, I wanted to be a mouse.

Not a timid mouse. Not a quiet mouse. And certainly not Mickey Mouse.

No, I wanted to be Ralph, the mouse with the motorcycle.

In the many appreciations of Beverly Cleary that have been posted since her death at age 104 last Thursday, there has been plenty of rightful attention paid to Ramona, her most famous character. Though I have nothing but respect for Ramona, my heart has always belonged to Ralph. Ms. Cleary always said she wrote “The Mouse and the Motorcycle” for her son. In doing this, she didn’t welcome just one boy into the world of her books; she welcomed generations of boys like me.

Third grade was a crucial time for me as a reader. I felt I was coming to a fork in the library aisles, where one path led to the Hardy Boys doing hardy boy things while Nancy Drew did mysteriously girl-coded things down the other. Even though Princess Leia was my favorite character to be when I played “Star Wars” with my friends (unusual, but not that unusual) and Marion Ravenwood was my favorite when we played “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (highly unusual, to the point of oddness), I still felt I needed to head for the mountainous boy-book terrain. I was supposed to read for action, not depth. Feelings were not a mystery the Hardy Boys ever needed to solve.

Then I found Ralph.

We meet him in Room 215 of the Mountain View Inn, where a boy named Keith has just arrived. (Keith’s parents are in an adjoining room.) As soon as Keith settles in, he pokes around the room, coming very close to discovering the knothole behind which Ralph and his mouse family live. Then Keith does exactly what I would have done, had I been the one checking into Room 215: He takes out his toy cars, plays with them, and then lines them up in a neat row before he goes to sleep.

Like most boys my age (and some, but not nearly enough, girls), I had an abundant collection of Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars. Unlike most kids my age, I gave each of my cars a name and a personality, and it was usually the sedans that got the most play. While some of my cars raced, most of my time with them was spent on storytelling that I’d now call relationship oriented. In my hands, they came to life.

Because of this, I knew exactly how Ralph felt, the first time he watched Keith play:

Ralph was eager, excited, curious, and impatient all at once. The emotion was so strong it made him forget his empty stomach. It was caused by those little cars, especially that motorcycle and the pb-pb-b-b-b sound the boy made. That sound seemed to satisfy something within Ralph, as if he had been waiting all his life to hear it.

Beverly Cleary knew what she was doing. She was writing directly to the reader, showing that she knew us and what our lives and feelings were like. She helped me realize I didn’t need to change myself into a detective or a knight or a Revolutionary War soldier in order to have an adventure or to be a boy. The adventure would come to me as part of the life I knew. Claiming a book about a talking mouse as a work of realism might seem a stretch, but Ms. Cleary’s magic was that she placed her flights of fancy so firmly in the lives of her very human characters that reading her stories always feels like soaring through real life. This was an inspiration to me as a reader and, later, as an author; it’s not a coincidence that I can trace back my writing career to the stories I wrote in third grade.

Lesson of the Day: ‘Losing a Loved One Twice: First to Prison, Then to Covid’

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Lesson of the Day: ‘Losing a Loved One Twice: First to Prison, Then to Covid’

“To not have any control over anything, to just be waiting and on the edge of your seat, it’s mind blowing at this point.” Janette’s fiancée, Michael, is detained on Rikers Island. He’s serving time because he failed to check in with his officer, violating his parole for drug possession. Now Michael, and hundreds like him, are at the center of a public health crisis experts have been warning about for weeks. “Two months owed to the city, it’s not worth somebody’s life. You’re giving people a life sentence leaving them there.” TV announcers: “An inmate who tested positive for Covid-19 died yesterday at Bellevue Hospital.” “Rikers is one of the largest correctional facilities in the world, and right now, the infection rate there is seven times that of New York City.” “Is our prison system equipped to handle an outbreak?” “When the coronavirus seeped into the jails, public officials, public advocates all rushed to address the situation.” “We will continue to reduce our jail population.” “We’re releasing people who are in jails because they violated parole.” When the virus was first identified in New York, there were 5,400 inmates in city jails. To combat the spread of the virus, the Board of Correction recommended the release of 2,000 inmates. Parole violators, people over 50, those medically at risk and inmates serving short sentences. But two weeks later, government officials have released just half. “Prisons, jails, are acting as incubators for the virus.” “Think about the jails as the world’s worst cruise ship.” “If we get a real situation here, and this thing starts to spread, it’s going to spread like wildfire, and New York is going to have a problem on their hands.” Thousands of employees travel through the city’s jails every day, forming a human lifeline to the city. Inmates also come and go. “So it’s particularly urgent to get this under control because it’s not just about who is in the jails right now, it’s really about the city.” This is Kenneth Albritton. He was being held on Rikers as Covid-19 spread through the city. “It’s scary in there, that’s what I would tell you. When I was in there, you had guys making their own masks with their shirts. They didn’t want to breathe in the air with the same people that’s in the dorm with them.” Kenneth was on parole after serving time for second-degree manslaughter when he was 18. “I was brought to Rikers Island on Feb. 5 for a curfew violation. For me reading a paper and watching the news, and I’m seeing that they’re saying no more than 10 to a group. But you have 50 guys that’s in a sleeping area. It’s impossible to tell us to practice social distancing there when they’re being stacked on top of each other.” After someone in his dorm tested positive, Kenneth says he was quarantined. But less than 24 hours later, he was released. He was given a MetroCard, but no guidance about how to deal with the potential spread of Covid-19. “If they would have tested me on my way out, then I would have felt like, OK, they took the proper steps. When I left the pen to come home, they told us nothing about how we should handle situation. Even though nobody told me nothing, I felt I should quarantine myself.” “Not much has been considered in terms of what happens to inmates after their release, and once they’re back in the communities and in their homes.” When we asked about the pace of releases, the mayor’s office agreed it was slow, but said they don’t have full control of the process. The state’s Department of Corrections said it’s working as quickly as possible. “My fiancée who’s on Rikers, we had our son in September and about two weeks after that, he found out that he had a warrant for his arrest.” “Oh, you got those boogies. I told you that baby likes that camera — Oh my goodness.” “This is a person with nonviolent charges. It’s like a real health care disaster. The parolees is like the easiest thing they do. Right. Yeah, they said about 500 or 700 parolees. I just had read it last night. Yes, that he signed off on it.” The outbreak at city jails doesn’t just pose a threat to inmates. On March 27, Quinsey Simpson became the first New York City corrections officer to die from Covid-19. “Correction officers every day, despite harm to themselves and their family, are rolling on this island to do this job.” Officer Husamudeen criticizes the city’s response, though he’s arguing for improving jail conditions not releasing inmates. “That’s not the answer to solving this problem. They haven’t served their time. If they served their time, they wouldn’t be on parole.” But his opposition is in the minority. While the overall population at Rikers has decreased, there’s an unusual consensus from public defenders, prosecutors and corrections officials that the releases aren’t happening quickly enough. “We need to reframe our thinking around public safety right now to accommodate the fact that public safety includes trying to prevent viral spread.” “My brother who’s a New York City schoolteacher contracted the coronavirus. Are you OK? Oh, I love you. Oh, you scared? What’s the matter? Oh, God. Don’t get into your head that it’s going to beat you. You’re going to beat this. OK? OK, I love you. OK, I’ll call you in a little while. OK. As a teacher, he had a lot of precautions, and thought he was following everything he was supposed to be doing, and he contracted the coronavirus going into a school. This is why I’m so adamant about fighting for Michael to get home. The person standing right next to you can have it and you wouldn’t even know it.” Across city jails, hundreds of inmates and corrections workers have tested positive, and half of all inmates are now under quarantine. “Covid-19 and the pandemic has exposed pretty rapidly sort of all of the weakest places in our social safety nets. And it is no surprise that one of those is the ways that jails put people at risk.” “I know, love — This is just ridiculously scary.”

Word of the Day: compunction

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Word of the Day: compunction

: a feeling of deep regret (usually for some misdeed)

_________

The word compunction has appeared in 14 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on May 1 in “Will New N.C.A.A. Rules Really Keep Agents and Boosters at Bay?” by Billy Witz:

Of course, there can only be so much sunshine when there are restrictions — or guardrails — in place. In professional sports, the money changes hands above the table. In college, it has simply been handed under the table. When athletes reach the N.F.L. and the N.B.A., the hypocrisy of college sports becomes far clearer to many of them.

That is why Odell Beckham Jr., the star N.F.L. receiver, felt no compunction about handing wads of cash to Louisiana State players on the field after his alma mater won the national football championship in January.

Can you correctly use the word compunction in a sentence?

Based on the definition and example provided, write a sentence using today’s Word of the Day and share it as a comment on this article. It is most important that your sentence makes sense and demonstrates that you understand the word’s definition, but we also encourage you to be creative and have fun.

Then, read some of the other sentences students have submitted and use the “Recommend” button to vote for two original sentences that stand out to you.

If you want a better idea of how compunction can be used in a sentence, read these usage examples on Vocabulary.com.

Students ages 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 16 and older elsewhere, can comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff.

Film Club: ‘Inside the Battle Over George Floyd Square’

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Film Club: ‘Inside the Battle Over George Floyd Square’

2. After watching, think about these questions:

  • What questions do you still have?

  • What connections can you make between this film and your own life or experience? Why? Does this film remind you of anything else you’ve read or seen? If so, how and why?

3. An additional challenge | Respond to the essential question at the top of this post: What does the debate over a memorial site tell us about the struggle for racial justice in one city, and for America?

4. Next, join the conversation by clicking on the comment button and posting in the box that opens on the right. (Students 13 and older are invited to comment, although teachers of younger students are welcome to post what their students have to say.)

5. After you have posted, try reading back to see what others have said, then respond to someone else by posting another comment. Use the “Reply” button or the @ symbol to address that student directly.

6. To learn more, read “Ten Months After George Floyd’s Death, Minneapolis Residents Are at War Over Policing.” John Eligon and Tim Arango:

MINNEAPOLIS — The sacred intersection where George Floyd died beneath the knee of a police officer has seen such an increase in violence that food delivery drivers are afraid to venture there. There have been gun battles, with bloodied shooting victims dragged to ambulances because of barricades keeping the police and emergency vehicles away.

“Having no police: This is the experiment right here,” said P.J. Hill, a leader of Worldwide Outreach for Christ, a church that has been on that corner in Minneapolis for almost 40 years. “This is their one-block experiment.”

Residents all over town still complain of officers using excessive force, like during a recent confrontation in which a white officer appeared to wind up and punch a Black teenager. And officers accuse some community members of antagonizing them, like in a recent dispute over a homeless encampment that erupted into a melee with punches and pepper spray.

Ten months ago, Minneapolis, and the country, seemed to coalesce around the belief that policing needed an overhaul after gruesome video footage surfaced of the last moments of Mr. Floyd’s life. Now, with the murder trial of the officer who knelt on Mr. Floyd’s neck scheduled to begin on Monday, the struggle over what to overhaul and how to do it has left Minneapolis at war with itself over public safety and the role of the police.

You can also follow Times coverage of the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former police officer charged in the death of George Floyd, here.

Want More Film Club?

• See all the films in this series.

• Read our list of practical teaching ideas, along with responses from students and teachers, for how you can use these documentaries in the classroom.

Lesson of the Day: ‘Rich Countries Signed Away a Chance to Vaccinate the World’

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Lesson of the Day: ‘Rich Countries Signed Away a Chance to Vaccinate the World’

7. What is your reaction to what you have read in this excerpt? How does it help to better understand the factors creating the global vaccine inequalities you explored in the warm-up activity? What questions do you still have?

Note: Those students who would like to learn more might opt to read the entire article and present the additional information to their classmates.

Option 1: Learn more about the human impact of global vaccine inequality

In “Some Nations Could Wait Years for Covid Shots. That’s Bad for Everyone.” Abdi Latif Dahir and Benjamin Mueller write that while richer places, such as the U.S., hope to vaccinate most of their citizens within months, poorer countries, like Kenya, expect to reach just small fractions of their populations in that time:

NAIROBI, Kenya — The nurse lay in bed this month, coughing, wheezing and dizzy with fever.

It was three months after rich countries began vaccinating health workers, but Kenyans like the nurse, Stella Githaiga, had been left behind: Employed in the country’s largest public hospital, she caught the coronavirus on an outreach trip to remote communities in February, she believes, sidelining her even as Kenya struggles with a vicious third surge of infections.

Ms. Githaiga and her colleagues are victims of one of the most galling inequities in a pandemic that has exposed so many: Across the global south, health workers are being sickened and killed by a virus from which doctors and nurses in many rich countries are now largely protected.

Read the entire article, then tell us your reaction: What are the political, economic and health impacts on developing countries that are unable to get access to vaccines, such as Kenya? What is the toll on continents, like Africa, which has 17 percent of the world’s people but so far has administered roughly 2 percent of the vaccine doses given globally? How did reading more on this topic add to your understanding? Did it change your perspective on the featured article? Share three takeaways from what you learned with your class.

Option 2: Make a recommendation to President Biden

The Biden administration pledged $4 billion to the global vaccination drive. In addition, it plans to send millions of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine to Mexico and Canada and is partnering with Japan, India and Australia to expand global vaccine manufacturing capacity. Do you think America is doing enough to address vaccine access across the world? Or should it be doing more?

If you were advising Mr. Biden, what would you recommend that he do to address the stark inequalities in the global distribution of Covid-19 vaccines? Should he pressure pharmaceutical companies to expand access to less affluent countries? Or is there a better way to close the global gap?

To help you make your recommendations to the president, you might read some of these recent Times articles and opinion essays:

Biden Takes First Tentative Steps to Address Global Vaccine Shortage

The Era of Vaccine Diplomacy Is Here

The U.S. Is Sitting on Tens of Millions of Vaccine Doses the World Needs

Let Our Doses Go!

Beyond The Times, you might also look at these resources:

Covid Lessons From Bush’s Effort Against AIDS (Wall Street Journal)

Would You Buy an NFT?

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Would You Buy an NFT?

Students in U.S. high schools can get free digital access to The New York Times until Sept. 1, 2021.

Do you know what a nonfungible token, or NFT, is? Shira Ovide explains in the On Tech newsletter “NFTs Are Neither Miracles nor Scams”:

Allow me to explain to normal humans what’s happening: NFTs are essentially a way to transform a digital good that can be endlessly copied into something one of a kind. When someone buys an NFT, what they’re effectively getting is the knowledge of owning an official version of a cat with a Pop-Tart body, a song, a video clip of a basketball dunk or another virtual thing. The records of ownership are maintained on a blockchain.

Now that you have some context, you can understand a little stunt the New York Times journalist Kevin Roose pulled on March 24. He turned his column about the rise of nonfungible tokens into an NFT itself and put it up for auction. The title of his follow-up piece expressed his disbelief at the high prices fetched by NFTs amid the current frenzy: “Why Did Someone Pay $560,000 for a Picture of My Column?”

Do you share Mr. Roose’s astonishment that a digital token of a column that is available to anyone on The New York Times’s website sold for more than half a million dollars? Do you think that owning an official version of a piece of digital media is worth this much — or even worth anything at all?

In short, how do you feel about the recent NFT mania?

In his original piece, “Buy This Column on the Blockchain!”, Mr. Roose provides more examples of NFTs, many of them works of digital art, that have sold for millions:

The NFT market is exploding right now, as early adopters and cryptocurrency enthusiasts try to cash in on the trend. Recently, Mike Winkelmann, a digital artist from South Carolina who goes by the name Beeple, sold “Everydays: The First 5000 Days,” a tokenized collection of his art, at an online auction at Christie’s for more than $69 million. NFTs representing other pieces of internet art — like an illustration of Homer Simpson as Pepe the Frog — have sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece. NBA Top Shot, a partnership between the N.B.A. and the blockchain company Dapper Labs that turns basketball highlight videos into unique cryptocollectibles, has $230 million in sales since 2019. Even well-known musical acts like Kings of Leon are getting in on the NFT action, selling millions of dollars’ worth of music in the form of digital tokens.

He then evaluates some of the arguments for and against the NFT boom:

Some of the NFT buzz is shallow hype, no doubt. The cryptocurrency world is full of scammers and get-rich-quick hustlers whose projects often end in failure. (Remember the initial coin offering boom?) And critics point out that NFTs and other cryptocurrency-related projects require enormous amounts of energy and computing power, making them a growing environmental hazard. There are also legitimate questions about what, exactly, NFT buyers are getting for their money, and whether these tokens will turn into broken links if the marketplaces and hosting services that store the underlying files disappear.

But there’s something real here that is worth taking seriously. For decades, artists, musicians and other creators have struggled with the fact that, on the internet, making copies of any digital artifact is trivially easy. Scarcity — the quality that gives offline art its value — was hard to replicate online, because anyone who downloaded a file could copy and paste it an infinite number of times, with no loss in quality.

Blockchain technology changed that by making it possible to stamp digital goods with a cryptographic marker of authenticity and keep a permanent record of its ownership. You can copy the file contained in an NFT all you want, but you can’t fake the digital signature behind it, which gives collectors of rare digital goods some peace of mind. And NFT fans think the technology could be used to keep track of all kinds of goods in the future — titles to houses and cars, business contracts and wills.

Students, read the entire article and then tell us:

  • In your own words, what is an NFT? How would you explain what a nonfungible token is to a friend or parent?

  • Would you ever buy an NFT? Of the NFTs mentioned in this article, which would you be most interested in owning? Would you sell a digital token of any of your own work?

  • How do you feel about the endless copying, altering and editing of digital media that takes place on the internet? Would owning an official version of a digital good like a video, a GIF or a song be worth something to you?

  • What other debates about the ownership of digital art have you heard about? For example, do you think that we need to do a better job crediting dance creators and preventing art from being copied on TikTok? What role might NFTs play in these conversations?

  • Are you concerned about the environmental impact of NFTs and other cryptocurrency-related projects? What do you think of the other arguments against the NFT buzz that Mr. Roose raises?

  • What questions do you still have about NFTs, cryptocurrency, blockchain or any of the other concepts in this article? Where will you look for answers?

About Student Opinion

• Find all of our Student Opinion questions in this column.
• Have an idea for a Student Opinion question? Tell us about it.
• Learn more about how to use our free daily writing prompts for remote learning.

Students 13 and older in the United States and the United Kingdom, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.

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