A local school is showing it’s never too early to get children learning about computer science.
Kindergarteners at Brown Elementary School helped Principal Joe Rommel show the St. Joseph School Board the importance of learning basic coding skills early in education Monday during a regular school board meeting held in the media center of Brown Elementary.
Rommel presented the St. Joseph School Board with an overview of Computer Science standards at the school, and how they are implemented. During the presentation, kindergartners used the Sphero Indi Educational Robot system to show off their coding skills by using color-coded mats to communicate instructions to the ‘indi’ car.
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Rommel said that starting with simple exposure to coding and robotics is a good way to introduce young learners to robotics in a fun way, and without screens.
“We try at this age level to give them a physical representation so you’re not just on the screen,” said Rommel, who is also a board member and former president of The Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning. “We’re doing something in real life, we’re getting real feedback right away. … It’s hard to think about computer science and kindergartners in the same sentence, but we we definitely can start there with our kids.”
Rommel stressed the importance of having the computer science learning as part of the normal school day.
“One of the things that we feel very strongly about in St. Joe … is that we’re trying to give opportunity to everybody,” Rommel said. “We know if it’s after school or it’s outside the school day, It’s harder to get kids there consistently. … We want kids to get this exposure early so we can make a difference for them and see if they stick with our program.”
Figures presented by Rommel showed that there are about 17,000 existing computing jobs with a starting average salary at $82,000.
“We know there are opportunities out there,” he said. “It’s funny to think about starting that in kindergarten, but if we give everybody the opportunity, then we’re not just keeping the kids that have … self-selected themselves into those programs, [and] we’re hopefully attracting a more diverse set of programmers, a different crowd of folks that are interested in this kind of work going forward.”
The Sphero indi project was made possible by a St. Joseph Public Schools Foundation grant.
By Ryan Yuenger
ryany@wsjm.com
