Menlo Park: Third-graders take on computer coding

“OK class, write your last line of code,” Nhi Vu, an instructor at Code for Fun tells a wiggly pack of third-graders at Belle Haven Elementary School on a recent Thursday afternoon.

By the end of the lesson, the kids in Michelle Chamapwat’s class had activated rudimentary digital animations to draw polygons on a set of coordinates.

Once a week, the students take a break from traditional classwork to dive into team-based computer coding lessons, prepared by Code for Fun, a nonprofit that teaches kids about computer science.

The program aims to give kids in grades K-8 in the Ravenswood City School District 10 hours of computer science instruction a year, with lessons that fit what the kids are learning in the classroom. For instance, this lesson was about angles and degrees, and introduced concepts Ms. Champawat said the students are expected to learn about later in the year. By the time those students graduate from eighth grade, they should be able to make their own video games, according to Servane Demol, founder and CEO of Code for Fun.

Facebook has committed to fund the program at Belle Haven Elementary and other schools in the Ravenswood City School District for four years, said a Facebook executive. The program expected to reach 1,400 students, the executive said. In that time, the nonprofit is expected to teach the schoolteachers how to instruct the coding classes themselves.

This opportunity, the executive said, “could be life-changing for some of these kids. We hope to see them down the road back here working for us.”

To some, the program might seem an extravagance, given the low English language and math scores at Belle Haven School According to 2016 test results from the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress, 81 percent of third- through eighth-graders did not meet grade-level standards for English language arts and 89 percent did not meet grade-level standards in mathematics.

However, Ms. Champawat said, the coding program can help build academic confidence in students who struggle in other areas.

“Kids take to it like penguins to water,” Ms. Champawat said. The collaborative focus of the program can help unleash student abilities and familiarize them with math and science concepts. “Computers speak to the part of the brain that needs structure,” she said.

One third-grader, who Ms. Champawat said struggles in most other areas at school, is a whiz when it comes to the coding class. That student told the Almanac that Code for Fun is his favorite class.

Another student who has excelled at Code for Fun is eighth-grader Christian, who has high-functioning autism, according to his mother. Last summer, Christian attended a Code for Fun camp with his younger sister. The coding program has boosted his confidence in science, math and social skills, his mother said.

Now Christian plans to become a marine biologist, and is already preparing himself for the kinds of calculations and coding he must learn to dive deep into the sea safely. “Nobody wants to go into a submarine knowing they can get squished to death,” he explained.

While Facebook has also assembled a toolkit to help kids learn to code on their own, that approach has limitations. (The toolkit is accessible at techprep.fb.com.) Many Belle Haven students don’t have computers or Wi-Fi access at home, explained Chelsea Card, a school administrator. “We couldn’t go paperless,” she said.

Code for Fun gives students “more exposure to things they don’t get in their home lives,” she said.

Christian’s mother said that while their family falls into the “extremely low income” bracket, she goes the extra mile to help her kids get internet access for their studies via Wi-Fi at places such as Starbucks and public libraries.