Excellence: It’s in Our Code

By Julia Fox

Students learn to code beginning in first grade at the Downtown Campus with the opportunity to take their skills all the way to AP courses or the competitive robotics team at Merle-Smith. Along the way, they flex their creativity, grow their skills, and are inspired by female role models in STEM.

When Sara Polefka ‘87MA teaches fifthgraders how to do what she calls “word coding,” she says, “You would think I’ve handed them a pile of brownies on a plate. They think it’s the coolest thing ever.”

She’s referring to introducing students to languages Python and Java. It’s a part of the coding program she launched nearly a decade ago for first through fifth-grade students at the Downtown Campus. Younger learners begin with block coding through a program hosted by Code.org, and eventually move up to programs like Scratch, a highlevel block-based visual programming language. The background knowledge students build in earlier grades gives them the foundation to grasp new concepts and run with them, like conditional and if/then statements and nested loops. They learn logical sequencing and problem-solving, but it feels like a game and inspires impressive projects.

By third grade, because most students have mastered the basics, they are allowed to work independently at home on their coding projects. For some, this is where their passion and aptitude for coding really begins to shine--students like Mark Zavilevich ‘30. “He’s beyond me right now,” says Polefka with pride. “I have him send his projects to me ahead of time so I can do them myself to make sure I understand how they work.”

Iris Cheng ‘32 is another coding whiz. She beams as she describes her latest project, in which a family of wolves has a conversation. The user can choose which line of dialogue the characters (also illustrated by Cheng) say next, resulting in multiple story lines coded using if/then statements.

Mia Stubbfield ‘30 also enjoys programming her characters to talk and move. “Coding is a great opportunity to connect with yourself,” she says. “Since I want to be a vet someday, I could use coding to create a website for where I work. I really like to code with Python and Java script on Ozaria.”

In the Downtown Campus Middle School, Ryan Berger hopes his coding elective “sparks an interest” in programming. Collaboration is emphasized as students work together to create Scratch games and understand the math needed for their programs to run. For instance, if students want to draw an eyeball, they need to know how many degrees are in a circle. When someone gets stuck, “one of their neighbors will lean over and help.”

Not everyone will become a professional programmer, but Berger believes the skills they learn are necessary and transferable, like problem solving, patience and perseverance. “They have to learn to go back and go over things repeatedly. We’re just so used to doing a grammar check or a spell check, and it’s done for you. It’s not done for you in coding.”

The “spark” and the skills learned with Berger in middle school are important; they bridge the gap between Polefka’s program and the Merle-Smith Campus’s Upper School program led by math teacher and all-around computer science maven, Ms. Lara Cesco-Cancian.

The computer science curriculum offers an introductory “Programming I” half-credit course, a more advanced independent study, and two AP courses (AP Computer Science Principles and AP Computer Science A.) There is also an honors-level cyber security course, a Computer Science and Machine Learning Club, and the opportunity to code and engineer robots on the First Robotics Competition Team.

For Cesco-Cancian, who teaches math in addition to computer science, it’s important to be a role model for students, especially girls. She says, “My favorite thing is bringing girls into computing and STEM and showing them that they can do it, and it can be girly and it can be fun, and we can have fun in class. It really is everyone’s thing.”

As she brings more students into the fold, Cesco-Cancian would love to see her program grow into a full computer science department in the future.