INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — As they walked into Ms. Sorenson’s classroom at Ernie Pyle School 90, students put down their iPads to pick up robots. Jenina Sorenson is in her first year teaching computer science at school for grades K-2. This is the first time the new class has been educated at the school. The purpose of the new coding class is to prepare young students for career opportunities in the future, especially in the ever-changing digital age.

“Introducing this at such a young age allows them to have that mindset and think outside the box about where we are with computers right now,” Sorenson said. “When I started teaching I think we only had jumping frogs and jumping pads and now we’ve advanced where every student has an iPad and every student has a computer, and it’s so much more advanced on the technological plan.

The school offers students Spheres coding robots, Wonder Workshop robots, and Ozobots color coding robots for kids.

Each individual bot serves to help learn the fundamentals of coding concepts to make the robots move through manual instruction of children. Sorenson points out that coding is becoming an important part of most workplaces as part of society’s current digital transformation.

“Just to see them have fun with learning and then realize that they’ve created a product to move an object and there’s no right or wrong answer when it comes to coding. Whatever however you choose to code, your creation is your creation,” Sorenson said.

According to Sorenson, the number of jobs requiring coding skills will grow exponentially as most services and products are digitized.

In kindergarten, students started the year learning that computers can only do what you tell them to do. They spend time acting like a computer and listening to step-by-step instructions. In first and second grade, students spend time working out instructions for moving a robotic dog through a maze. Just like kindergarteners, first and second graders do it in an unplugged way. In the process, first graders write and animate a story while in the next level, students progress to creating an online game.

Sorenson said programming at Ernie Pyle helps students on many levels:

• Presentation of teamwork: Sorenson’s system uses pair programming, which involves two students working together to code a program. One student is the driver and the other student is the navigator. By working in this way, students learn to solve problems and work in teams, including communicating and expressing themselves and their ideas.
• Help build resilience: By learning to code, students develop the ability to bounce back from failure. Programming is not black and white. It is a learning process and students can try and try again until they are successful and produce the result they are looking for.
• Develop cognitive abilities: Programming is not just about writing lines of code. Rather, it is about teaching students to think logically. They need to see the bigger problem and break it down into smaller pieces in order to solve it effectively.
• Develop creativity: Programming teaches students to experiment and gives them the confidence to be creative. Programming gives them a chance to design something that is entirely theirs. It gives them internal recognition for a job well done when they created.

Sorenson believes that students who learn the basics of coding will develop skills that will impact the rest of their lives. The benefits range from improved math, critical thinking, and problem solving, all of which are skills that need to be developed.

“Today, we cannot allow students to wait for college to learn coding, as our society is increasingly reliant on digitalization. We need to invest in these skills now, as they are the next generation of digital natives and are ready to embrace it,” Sorenson said.