Code mode: Peters Township students learn programming for future’s sake
Peters Township Middle School students work on learning the Scratch programming language: from left, Demetrius Mesogitis, Ashley Maggs, Corban Hondru and student instructor Kasmier Moncheck.
Annalise Ruggieri listens to an instructional video for the Scratch programming language.
Peters Township Middle School students Myla Sroka, left, and Alaina Koutsogiani work on learning the Scratch programming language.
In his daily conversations with students, Peters Township Middle School principal Adam Sikorski often hears about their career aspirations.
One young lady recently told him she wants to be a fashion designer, and in the next breath asked why she would need to learn how to write code for computers: “It doesn’t apply to me.”
Her principal begged to differ.
“OK, it’s going to take coding if you’re going to be selling your brand,” Sikorski told her. “You’re going to need to develop a website. You’re going to need to develop programs for the different designs. And when you’re starting, you’re not going to have the funds to just pay somebody to do that.”
Having been so informed, the student no doubt took a different attitude into the school’s participation in the international Hour of Code, as one of nearly 150,000 such events around the globe to teach as many youngsters as possible to program computers.
At Peters Township Middle School, that means all 600 students.
“These kids are going to be looking for jobs in all kinds of different industries, whether it’s fashion or entertainment or music or automobiles, and any one of those is going to be looking for people who solve problems,” computer science teacher Stephanie Van Balen said. “And computers are the best way to do that.”
She and colleague Brian Griffin organized the activity, which took place in study labs Dec. 5 to 8 as part of National Computer Science Week. They selected 38 students to help instruct their classmates about coding, including eighth-grader Kara Joseph.
“It was really fun with the seventh-graders, because they weren’t really sure how to do this yet,” she said. “We’ve done something like this before.”
Griffin lauded their efforts.
“Without them, there is no way we’d be able to reach this many students,” he said. “So they’re really the driving force behind this entire activity, and they’re doing a fantastic job. It’s really interesting to see them to take that leadership role in front of their peers. The students are responding very well to it. There’s a lot of respect that’s given to them.”
Van Balen agreed.
“They’re benefiting from it because they’re learning as they teach,” she explained. “And the students respond to it because they like working with their peers, and sometimes taking direction from peers as opposed to actual teachers.”
For the Hour of Code activity, students used the web-based program Google CS First, employing the Scratch programming language. Griffin said they can access the program from home if they’d like to continue working with it.
And that’s something Sikorski would encourage.
“The skills that you get from programming last with you for whatever you are going to do,” he said. “Problem solving is the biggest one.”