With help from Owensboro Innovation Academy, the elementary students will use a program called Tynker, which they will have access to outside of school, including as a mobile app to use on smartphones.
"We wanted to introduce our elementary school students to some basic programming, coding," said Logan Walker, computer science teacher at OIA. "Our district last year purchased a Tynker license for the whole district. It's a program we thought elementary students were familiar with but maybe don't have the time in class to get as in-depth with programming."
Walker said Tynker is aimed at elementary students.
"When I first started six or seven years ago, it was primarily elementary school," he said. "Over the years they've added some middle school and high school stuff. Even I use it in my high school classroom."
The elementary students have been very receptive to learning how to code, Walker said.
"We've done this in years past with another program called code.org," he said. "We did it before COVID, and when COVID came up we kind of had to stop that. But now that we're kind of back in the flow of things, I reached out to Sydney McFadden, our district digital learning coach, and said we need to bring it back, and she was on board."
Walker and McFadden were at Foust and Sutton elementary schools Wednesday, with Cravens, Estes and Newton Parrish elementary schools participating Jan. 18.
"Girls Inc. has even reached out to us because they heard about it, so we may even partner with some people outside of the school system," Walker said.
On Wednesday, the students were learning block coding, which Walker said is a good introduction to coding.
"It's not text-heavy," he said. "A lot of the time at the high school level, we may have a program that doesn't work because they forgot a semi-colon somewhere or they misspelled a word somewhere."
Walker said with block-based, the coding aspect is already built-in behind the scenes within the blocks.
"All they have to do is drag and connect blocks like Legos," he said. "It's a good intro to programming."
McFadden said Hour of Code is a global initiative that primarily takes place in December during computer science week.
"When we started it back up, we decided to do it in January to try and attract more student participation," she said. "When I was at the middle school, we did an Hour of Code in December and wanted to do it at the elementary schools, and this was the year we were able to start doing that."
McFadden said she received over 100 permission slips for students to participate in the after-school course.
"Sutton had 40 students show up (on Wednesday)," she said. "They are eager to learn, and some want to do this every week."
Some OPS elementary students will be able to participate in a coding activity every week. Foust is beginning a club that will meet weekly, and Newton Parrish is using Tynker in computer classes.
"It's very important to learn at an early age, to teach them that anyone can do it, because we don't want them to be hesitant or think that it's hard," she said. "If it sparks an interest, that works because we offer computer science classes at the middle and high school levels. Computers are everywhere, and getting them familiar at an early age is helpful."
Some OIA students are assisting Walker and McFadden in teaching the elementary students, and McFadden said most of the OIA students learned how to code in elementary school through Hour of Code.
Ciel Vinson, fifth grader at Foust, said she decided to participate in Hour of Code because it sounded fun and interesting.
"It's a new place for me to learn, because I have not learned much about coding," she said.
Vinson said she learned how to make objects move and dodge obstacles on a computer on Wednesday.
Ethan Daniel, fourth grader at Foust, said he had already been working on Tynker and enjoys coding.
"It's fun, and it's kind of satisfying when you have stuff that you need to get somewhere," he said.
On Wednesday, Daniel said he learned that he is able to search within the Tynker program and that it is important to follow the steps instead of skipping through them.
©2023 the Messenger-Inquirer (Owensboro, Ky.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
