CMU students, Google help SF improve tech curriculum
Amal Nanavati, a Carnegie Mellon University student, helps a South Fayette student learn Python programming.
Vinay Pedapati, left, helps one of his peers better understand coding.
South Fayette students stay after school to learn Python programming, which the district hopes to roll out in the fall in the eighth-grade curriculum.
The inclusion of Python into the South Fayette curriculum will ease the transition to coding for eighth-graders when they enter high school.
A question Aileen Owens has grown accustomed to answering is “How did this happen?”
It’s a question that refers to how South Fayette School District climbed the charts as a destination for parents – not only those in the area or state, but the entire country – who are seeking the best education for their children.
To further its initiative of “vertically aligned computational thinking,” the district, along with students from Carnegie Mellon University and a developer from Google Pittsburgh, have launched an incubator program to offer Python programming language to all eighth-graders beginning next year.
The afterschool program is brought to the middle school by students from Tecknowledge, an outreach team that supports students in their acquisition of quality computer science and technology education to help teach Python to students and district teachers.
“When we started investigating our kindergarten through grade 12 program, we realized that we are doing a very good job teaching students in grades K to 8 with block-based codes, sensors and robotics,” said Owens, the district’s director of technology and innovation. “There has to be a better transition to the high school, where we teach Java. Python is a quick language, it has very strong, deep libraries, and it can be useful in the tech industry. That’s why we chose it for our students.”
The eight-week program also consists of bringing in a computer science consultant to observe the incubator and evaluate its effectiveness on students and teachers learning the programming language.
“Python is a great stepping stone to learn more languages like Java,” said Parv Shrivastava, a ninth-grader at South Fayette who also serves as a teaching assistant for the program. “It really cultivates students into the field of technology and gets them to experience what text-based coding is like. It’s the bridge to other coding languages.”
It can be used for web and internet development, database access, desktop GUIs, education, network programming and software and gaming development. More importantly, it will make an easier transition for eighth-grade students when they enter high school.
“It’s a very simple programming language and a great way to start line coding,” said South Fayette sophomore Vinay Pedapati.
Pedapati and Shrivastava’s interests in coding both began with their parents and was fueled by the early experience adopted into the curriculum as early as kindergarten in the district.
“This is something I never would have been involved with even at this age,” CMU student Michael Wagner said. “When I was in eighth grade, programming was the last thing on my mind. Maybe if there were opportunities like this I would’ve gotten involved earlier. It’s amazing that we are able to provide this opportunity to pursue this type of learning.”
The program goes through the curriculum step by step and represents what a typical class would resemble. It will be evaluated and tweaked once again before another beta test in the summer with a different group of student, with the intent of rolling it out in the fall in the eighth-grade curriculum.
“We are one of the first districts in the country to create a vertically aligned, computational-thinking initiative,” Owens said.
And just how did that happen?
“The answer is because we’ve changed traditional education and transformed it to create innovative leaders,” Owens said. “This right here is how we do it.”