STARKVILLE — Third-grader Grace Campbell finished coding a series of actions on an iPad before staring down at the little blue robot on the floor in front of her. Nothing happened.
“It’s my first time doing this,” she said. “It’s very difficult to try to program it. If you don’t program it to do something, it’s not going to do it.”
After a few more rounds of coding and waiting, the robot backed up, spun around and made an enthusiastic sound, just as Campbell had programmed it. It can be difficult to figure out the problem, she said, but the challenge is her favorite part.
“I like when I figure out something that I can’t do,” Campbell told The Dispatch.
Campbell was enrolled in the beginner coding and robotics enrichment camp during Starkville-Oktibbeha Consolidated School District’s fall intersession this week, which wrapped up Friday.
The district has two intersession periods each year when students can attend additional days of school outside of regular instruction.
Students can either attend enrichment camps, where they explore new areas or interests, or accelerated learning, where students get extra help in reading and math.
Parents can enroll their students in one of 13 enrichment camps with subjects ranging from dinosaurs and dirt to ocean exploration and advanced composite engineering. Students spend the week learning a new lesson on the subject each day, followed by hands-on activities or field trips to solidify the learning.
Intersession Coordinator and Program Manager Mauriesa Blackwell said one of the biggest impacts on students who participate in the enrichment camps is the exposure they get to new careers.
“You see the pictures of the little kids, and they’re digging in the sand. But what they’re learning about is archaeology. They’re playing in water out here, but what they’re learning about is that somebody is responsible for water treatment,” Blackwell said. “So all of the activities, while it looks like maybe fun little crafts at the elementary level, they’re all learning about something that they might not have known was a career before.”
The exploration is a part of a districtwide initiative to expose students to career options early, so that they have a better idea of how they want to plan their high school careers. The goal is for career exploration to eventually shift into workforce development, she said.
“What we’ve tried to do in our district is at all levels, from start to finish through their entire K-12 experience, to create some strategic career exploration opportunities, and intersession is one of those,” she said. “You get those layers of career exploration that help kids hone in on what they’re interested in and what they’re not interested in.”
Teachers working during intersession get a chance to join in on the fun too, Communications Director Haley Montgomery said.
“It gives them a chance to explore something they’re interested in and sort of expand their creativity,” she said. “They can come up with subjects that they find interesting and love to teach, and then pair it with activities, new resources and different things like that.”
Isabel McLemore, who typically teaches fourth-graders at Henderson Ward Stewart Elementary, pitched her idea for a beginner coding and robotics camp after participating in a computer science workshop through the Mississippi Children’s Museum.
“I hardly knew anything … but I learned enough to teach kids and pass that passion and love onto them,” she said. “We had 20 students sign up for (the camp) within 11 minutes, and it sold out.”
After spending a week teaching students how to identify, build and code robots, she said the biggest reward is watching them fall in love with the subject. Even if her students aren’t interested in a future robotics career, they’re still building problem solving skills, she said.
“Some of them knew nothing about any of this, and now they have enough knowledge that if their regular classroom teacher (got robots out), they would know enough to help their peers,” she said.
Accelerated learning
Outside of the enrichment camps, students who need extra help sharpening their math and reading skills are taught by graduate psychology students from Mississippi State University.
Montgomery said teachers and administrators help identify SOCSD students throughout the beginning of the year who may need extra help. Then the students are invited to participate in the accelerated learning program, which is optional, she said.
“They get some one-on-one help from teachers, which they may not get in the regular school day, and some small groups and things that are focused specifically on skills that they need,” Montgomery said.
Teaching intersessions is optional for district teachers, so the graduate students help fill in areas that need more instructors, Blackwell said. The graduate students get extra experience, while SOCSD students get more focused instruction, she said.
“The impact is getting individualized, real-time small group instruction,” she said. “We limit our class sizes to smaller than they would be during the regular school year, so you’re looking at a group of 10 to 15 students working with one (graduate student).”
McRae is a general assignment and education reporter for The Dispatch.
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