In a push to get ahead in the ever-evolving tech landscape, San Antonio's youngest are now getting schooled in the language of the future—coding. At Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran School, students are taking their first steps in computational thinking before many of them have even learned to tie their shoes. The school's innovative curriculum has pre-K and kindergarten tots delving into coding languages like Scratch and Python with the gusto typically reserved for recess games.
Once a week, for several hours, the students team up, not to kick around a soccer ball, but to maneuver robots of their own creation, under the guidance of instructor Jim Jewell. This early introduction to complex problem-solving isn't just for kicks; it's setting the stage for these youngsters to master more advanced skills as they grow, picking up lessons on resilience along the way. According to FOX San Antonio, Jewell believes that robotics teaches kids about life's inevitable failures and the importance of perseverance, asserting, “Kids make mistakes, and a lot of times, they give up. if they give up, then, they’ve lost. but these kids learn over and over again, that the more times they fail, the better it’s gonna make them.”
Moving beyond the playground, students in the San Francisco-based Young Gates online Python camp are proving that coding is no longer confined to a physical space. Eager learners log in from home to enhance their coding capabilities, tackling Python tools, string manipulation, and data structures, among others, as laid out by their syllabus. With virtual classrooms becoming a staple, these kids need nothing more than a laptop and decent internet connection to join the digital revolution—no outdated tablets or iPads allowed here.
It's not all just bits and bytes for these budding tech whizzes. With dreams bigger than their code libraries, kids, still a stone's throw away from middle school, are envisioning robots that could tackle real-world problems. Fifth-grader Kumar Nandi told FOX San Antonio about his dream robot would autonomously clean trash in rivers, "I've always wanted to have something like a robot that would self autonomously, uh, clean trash in rivers because I just hate seeing trash in rivers." Meanwhile, 9-year-old Bree Bellanger is already thinking about the implications for the construction industry, stating she wants “...my robot to build a building, so people don’t have to go work outside and do it. They can just build a bot, well they can just use the bot to build it for them.”
The initiative at Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran School and the Young Gates camp are firm reminders that the tech titans of tomorrow are minted today. And San Antonio's and San Francisco's youngsters are well on their way to scripting their place in a digitized world, one line of code at a time. More details about the Young Gates online Python camp can be found at Kids Out and About San Antonio.
