Middle school gets new coding program for tech-y future

WASILLA — It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and Wasilla educators are working to prepare students for the technological side of it.

As technology advances, so does the need for people who truly understand the inner workings of the gizmos and gadgets that have become a part of daily life. This, in part, is why Matanuska Telephone Association (MTA) has paired up with the Mat-Su Borough School District to implement its first-ever Coding Academy at Wasilla Middle School.

“Coding has truly become the new language of our generation,” said teacher Shelly Youngberg.

This summer, the borough removed several standalone locker banks (about 300 lockers) from Wasilla Middle to make room for a workspace to complement the primary coding classroom, which contains dozens of desktop computers. The open area now consists mainly of tables and chairs, with a big electronic blackboard on each side of the room for large-group instruction.

At a ribbon cutting ceremony Wednesday, Nov. 18, school staff and a group of sixth-grade coding students took time out of their day to celebrate the new space and the program with school board members and MTA employees.

The ceremony was also a time to face facts.

“It’s gonna get to the point where we can’t just be users of computers, but creators,” said coding teacher Penny Groth.

Having taught Russian exclusively for eight years, Groth encountered a significant learning curve in preparing to teach the class, though she had “always been a little tech savvy,” she said. That’s why principal Casey Hull said he picked her.

“She thought I was nuts,” Hull said.

But by the time the start of the school year rolled around in August, Groth had navigated her way through the online curriculum and was ready to begin her full schedule — six classes — of teaching code for simple games, web pages and creating 3D images on the computer.

This quarter, all the classes are full of sixth-grade students, though all are expected to have taken a coding class by the time they move on to high school.

Like most of her classmates, student Brooklyn Robinson said she had only heard a little about coding (such as the phrase/acronym “HTML”), but quickly found the class fun and educational.

“You get to make your own games and then teach it to other people,” she said.

Student Makenna Smith was also excited about having made her own game, as well as generating an image from textual commands.

“There’s really no part that’s boring,” she said.

Brandi Whisnant — who spoke during the ribbon-cutting —claims she’s “all about computers and electronics,” though she never really knew how they worked. The class has also helped correct some self-taught typing habits, and has encouraged her to continue gaining technological skills in the future.

That’s what her classmate, Shaun Stinson, is looking forward to as well. Being more computer literate, he said, will surely contribute to his career.

“I could get a really cool job, like a gaming engineer, or be a business dude in a really big building,” he said.

The effect of one’s digital literacy on the job search is a significant one. Mat-Su Borough School District Superintendent Dr. Deena Paramo said that, according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, 50 percent of jobs in the U.S. will require some understanding of computer science on the part of the employee by the year 2020. In addition, the average person will own five “connective devices” by that time, meaning someone is going to have to know how to fix or program those devices.

“The world doesn’t care, boys and girls, what you know. They care what you can do with what you know,” Paramo said during the ceremony.

MTA CEO Michael Burke agreed that having an advanced understanding of computers will help students excel, as well as contribute to job growth in the Mat-Su Valley.

“That’s really kind of the goal here, is really to help foster growth and job development in the community where we can help people take advantage of these technologies,” he said.

Wasilla Middle ended up being a good place to start for two reasons, one of which is space. Hull said they were able to take out the lockers because they weren’t needed, as a result of Redington Jr./Sr. High taking on about 200 former WMS students.

The second reason is that WMS feeds the school with the largest population of computer science students, which according to Paramo is Wasilla High. So as middle school students enter the high school with higher levels of digital literacy, the high school program will ideally have room to eventually expand class offerings.

But just because a student learns computer skills such as coding doesn’t mean he or she will understand the etiquette of using technology, an important aspect of such education, Paramo said.

“Being a good digital citizen also means putting your phone away (at times). It also means using what we know for good and not evil.”

Contact reporter Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com