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Students of all ages creating, discovering through coding
Students throughout Folsom Cordova schools are increasingly getting hands-on experience developing computer science skills that can open a world of possibilities.
Whether learning the basic building blocks of coding or elbow-deep into advanced programming, students’ mental cogs are spinning, generating possibilities, and shaping their abilities.
“Coding has changed the way the students think, because it encourages them to break down large problems into smaller ones,” says Mathew Chan, a fourth grade teacher at Riverview STEM Academy.
At Riverview, Chan’s fourth graders work on coding for about an hour each Friday, using the free and self-paced curriculum provided by code.org.
"I like that it has puzzles, and it is fun to solve them,” said fourth-grader Sarah Pandey. “It makes me smarter on puzzles.”
Chan said the benefits are wide-ranging: “This helps them in all subject areas. For example in math, when they need to explain their reasoning of how they arrived at an answer to a word problem or multiplication or division problem, they can explain better their steps, because in coding they have practiced making large things into small.”
Douglas Lewin, a computer science teacher at Vista del Lago High School, said that coding is challenging but rewarding work for his students. In Lewin’s class, students learn advanced skills such as Python, HTML, CSS, PHP, SQL, and UNIX.
“For many students, it is much harder than they will think it will be. The concepts of programming are foreign for many students,” he said. “Students have to evolve in the class. At first they wander around in a haze, lost. Then they wander above the haze and can create basic programs. They begin to understand the connections between the program and the problem to be solved. ”
In Paul Schiele’s fifth-grade classroom at Russell Ranch Elementary School, students use Scratch to learn basic programming and use Modkit to program robots. His students have used Scratch Jr. to create their own animated storyboards, with dialogue and text to convey a story.
Jacob Lawrence, one of Schiele’s students, said, “It’s almost everyone’s favorite subject.”
“My students love coding because it allows them to express themselves in a creative, digital way, where the sky's the limit on their ideas,” Schiele said. “It doesn't necessarily have a ‘right’ answer and often they get to encounter challenges to solve. When they do this, it is not uncommon to hear, ‘Yes! I just did it!’”
Schiele said one of his students, who had been struggling for several years, began to blossom – and see himself in future careers – as he discovered a talent for programming.
“Programming has given him a reason to like school, feel successful, and to dream about a possible future,” he said.