The school district is one of the few in the state to offer coding classes across K-12
Five Cinnaminson technology educators made their way to Atlantic City on Jan. 25 to deliver a special presentation at the New Jersey Association of School Administrators Techspo 2018, a two-day conference that brings together school leaders from across the state for technology training and exhibits.
Led by department supervisor Kathy Hennelly, New Albany School’s Carol Kremus, Rush School’s Mike Noble, Cinnaminson Middle School’s Rob Spier and Cinnaminson High’s Nancy Mulville worked as a team to co-create and present “Coding Through the Years,” an overview of the vertical articulation in planning and programming in Cinnaminson’s computer programming classes, according to Superintendent Stephen Cappello. The district is one of the few in New Jersey to offer comprehensive coding curricula to students from K-12.
“Some of the programs are in their infancy so it is truly amazing to see how far we have come so quickly,” Capello said in his message to the Board of Education. “I was an extremely proud superintendent to watch our team deliver an excellent presentation before an engaged audience of educators and technology professionals.”
At Cinnaminson schools, students learn coding skills through creative lessons that incorporate games, simple robotics and programs such as code.org’s “Hour of Code.” The youngest students, even those who aren’t reading yet, engage with the basics with Bee Bots, the MIT-developed Scratch and child-friendly apps such as Kodable and Tynker.
The middle school students take their programming chops to the next level under Spier, who teaches them more advanced Scratch sequences and starts to get them started on Python, a high-level program for general purpose programming.
“I’m quite proud of what we’ve done. A lot of the people we spoke to yesterday were sharing their challenges with us after the presentation, and asking us for guidance,” Hennelly said. “One of the reasons we are leaders in implementing programming education across all grades is because we have such wonderful teachers.”
Noticing a lack of female students in the high school’s elective coding classes, Mulville, along with Spier, also implemented a chapter of Girls Who Code at the middle and high schools this year. Now in its sixth week, the teachers managed to attract 17 committed members who will use the extracurricular to work on original projects. In grades nine to 12, these female students and their male counterparts will have the opportunity to take their knowledge further with Mulville’s lessons on HTML, JavaScript and CSS.
Hennelly said the collaborative efforts of her team have not only made Cinnaminson an archetype for implementing coding at every stage of student development, but gives students confidence by making coding more approachable.
“The beauty is that if you’re introduced to this as young as kindergarten, you don’t think of it as something hard to do. That’s our goal,” she said.
