PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — On top of reading, writing and arithmetic, Philadelphia elementary schools are learning coding.
On Monday, Philadelphia School District’s digital offerings were highlighted at William Rowen School to commemorate Computer Science Education Week.
William Rowen is one of the district’s 123 elementary schools that has digital literacy teachers.
“Being a good digital citizen, knowing how to do appropriate research, knowing how to integrate what you're learning on a computer, with science, that's our real goal,” said Melanie Harris, the district’s chief information officer.
Fifth grader Nyjah Shepherd and her classmates at William Rowen sat on their classroom floor with Superintendent Tony Watlington and showed him how they control a Sphero, a spherical robot about the size of a cue ball.
“We have to go around the letters using code and only code,” Shepherd said. “We can’t drive it because that would be cheating!”
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In Mitzi Brown’s digital literacy class, fifth grade students write code that controls small robots. When they don’t function properly, students take the initiative to troubleshoot them.
“They are actually stopping, figuring it out, fixing their codes and moving with it by themselves,” Brown said.
Virtual reality helps to demystify concepts for young students, said William Rowen’s principal James Murray.
“The headsets that are sitting there on the table, they allow youngsters to go inside of an atom to see what an electron might look like.”
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Murray, a former U.S. Air Force programmer, said it’s his passion to see more children of color involved in science and technology.
“Providing students with spaces to see scientists and computer programmers who look like them is a big priority for me.”