Issue link: http://educator.cta.org/i/498229
STEM teacher Kelly Rafferty and kindergartners at Santa Rita Elementary School in Los Altos (in the heart of Silicon Valley) watch Bee-Bot maneuver to the right spaces after the youngsters program him correctly. Rafferty says that even in kindergarten, youngsters are ready to learn coding. Lele Wang programs Bee-Bot at Santa Rita Elementary School in Los Altos. P H O T O G R A P H Y B Y S C O T T B U S C H M A N It looks like child's play, but the youngsters who attend Santa Rita Elemen- tary School in Silicon Valley are actually learning the basics of coding. In its simplest terms, coding is using computer language to tell the computer what to do, step by step. Bee-Bot looks like a toy, but he can remember increasingly sophisticated commands and is helping the children learn sequencing and problem-solving skills that will serve as a foundation for computer program- ming later on. "I like this," says Sara Perekhodnik, a kindergartner coding with Bee-Bot. "It's so fun." Rafferty is a STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) teacher for her district who visits the classrooms of fellow Los Altos Teachers Asso- ciation members to teach coding with Bee-Bot, his "big brother" Pro-Bot (in the guise of a race car), and other programmable gadgets. Coding in kindergarten? Really? "They can handle it," says Rafferty with a smile. "By the time these stu- dents are in second or third grade, they'll be writing their own programs in Scratch or ScratchJr." (Scratch, along with the junior version, is a free programming lan- guage where participants can create their own interactive stories, games and animations.) Coding, once a college-level course, is now de rigueur in some K-12 classrooms. While President Obama urged public education to put its C o n t i n u e d o n p a g e 1 7 around a smiling yellow and black robot named Bee-Bot. Kelly Rafferty asks them to roll the dice and send Bee-Bot to the corresponding square on a checkered plastic sheet. Students take turns pushing Bee-Bot's button in correct sequences to enter various commands. To their delight, Bee-Bot blinks and beeps as he inches toward his destina- tion in a series of moves left, right, forward or back. The kindergartners eagerly gather 15 V O L U M E 1 9 I S S U E 8