Learning coding? Building robots? It’s elementary — elementary school, that is

Nine-year-old Reid Stainbrook is already an old pro at using a 3-D printer after only a few hours of working with it.

He’s grown comfortable with the technology at the Spark16150 lab at Arbor Creek Elementary in Olathe.

“It’s probably one of the easiest things” in the lab, Reid said.

His next project? To make a plastic tennis ball that won’t break when he uses it to play with his dog.

Nearby, 9-year-old Colin Johnson was using special building blocks called Cubelets to make some special structures.

One of his best projects was a lighthouse with a light that actually spins. He also demonstrated how he could use a Bluetooth connection with his iPad to make the blocks move.

Technology and STEM education aren’t just the latest fads — they’re here to stay. And local elementary schools like Arbor Creek and Bluejacket-Flint are jumping to incorporate these lessons into their curriculum by using technology labs and innovation centers known as makerspaces.

According to a U.S. Department of Education estimate, by 2022, the U.S. will need to add about 1 million professionals in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics to meet the workforce demands of the future.

To spark an early interest among elementary-age children, schools are adding Legos, robotics and other brain-boosting technology. The idea is to get kids interested in learning and doing robotics and coding while they’re still in elementary school, so by the time they’re in high school, they’ll have a more developed interest and will be able to do more.

“A lot of the kids don’t know how to tinker. They don’t know how to just experiment and try things. Now, they’re starting to get comfortable … (they have this sense of) ‘I did this. I figured it out on my own, and no one told me how to do it,’ ” said Kevin Frick, principal of Bluejacket-Flint Elementary in the Shawnee Mission school district.

At Bluejacket-Flint, there’s a special lab full of different technological resources. The school won a $10,000 grant through the Hour of Code to build it last year.

A big emphasis there is learning to create code for different forms of technology, from simple patterns to more advanced ideas.

“All of our robotic stuff is programmable,” said Michelle Brown, instructional coach at Bluejacket-Flint.

That includes Ozobots, little robots that follow different color paths created by the kids; Lego WeDos, Lego projects that can connect to an iPad; and Dash and Dot robots, which the kids can control with different apps. There’s even a robot students can code to play songs on a xylophone.

“Anything you could do with a Lego, you now have a device that can power the Lego,” Brown said. “The options with these go on and on.”

There are various levels of technology aimed at different ages and skill levels. Little Bits, circuit boards that kids can join together to create electronic connections, can be a good activity that’s somewhere in between low-tech and high-tech, Brown said.

The kids can work solo, but most of the time, they’re working in groups to figure out the devices and create something with them.

“For some of our younger students, it might take quite a bit longer (to understand the technology) and a lot more direction, where some of our fifth- and sixth-graders, you can kind of give it to them, and they can explore,” Brown said. “There’s variations (of code) that even the youngest kids can do.”

Brown said they’re hoping to build partnerships by having older students teach and help younger students with various tech projects.

An early spark

It might seem odd to introduce coding and robotics to someone as young as 6, but it all fits into a larger strategy to get kids interested in science and technology.

For Jamie Sachs, director of education at New Hampshire-based For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, getting kids interested when they’re young is essential.

“Students make a decision in fourth or seventh grade whether they’re good at STEM,” Sachs said. “We want to try and get kids interested or at least help them understand that they can do STEM before they decide, ‘I’m not good this.’ ”

According to Sachs, the interest in boosting technological learning at the elementary level has grown gradually over the last 10 years.

“I liken it to right after 2000, when online learning was a big trend, and that’s now become more mainstream. I think STEM is the next hot topic. It all stems down from the predictions for careers (in those fields),” she said.

Because the prices of various robotics kits, 3-D printers and other technology has gone down, these objects have become more reasonable for a school to purchase as learning tools. They’re still not cheap — an Ozobot classroom kit retails for $1,195—but grants like the one Bluejacket-Flint received make it possible.

Sachs doesn’t expect every child who learns about robotics to become a programmer or technology designer.

“Even if you’re not going to be a computer programmer, it’s definitely going to be an advantage if you at least understand how it works,” she said. “It affects every profession in some way.”

Some states, including Georgia, Washington and Florida, have considered making computer coding an acceptable way to fill a secondary school foreign language requirement.

When you talk about teaching coding to a first-grader or even a sixth-grader, it’s a completely different method than what you’d do in a high school or college classroom.

“There’s a lot of great tools out there now to teach kids to code without writing code,” Sachs said.

FIRST, which encourages learning and creativity in the STEM fields, uses Blockly, an open-source Google product that allows kids to group commands that look more comprehensible to the untrained eye than normal computer code. Those commands might tell a robot to move forward or turn right using plain language encapsulated in colored blocks connected in a long chain of instructions.

With regular computer code, such as Java or Python, you have “a line of code with all the parentheses and periods, and if you get one wrong, it won’t work,” Sachs said. With Blockly, the commands “won’t snap together if it’s in an order that doesn’t make sense.”

There are even tools available for older kids to view the commands on a split screen. One side shows the command blocks, while the other shows what you’d really have to type if you were using code the way professional programmers would.

“The aim is to get kids interested and learn to do computational thinking to create that interest and spark in the hope that they will go on to more complicated endeavors,” Sachs said. “Anytime you can spark that interest and get them to want to learn more and also get them to realize this is something they can do. There is this concerted effort to show kids this is something everyone can do.”

Computational thinking is the key skill when it comes to many of these technological games and activities.

“When you’re programming or writing code, it’s got to be very detailed and very exact. You have to say, ‘I want you to turn 90 degrees due west and take five steps forward … (we want) to teach kids to be OK if their first try doesn’t work. The way real life works is that you usually have multiple iterations to get it right,” she said.

Some of the robots Sachs sees in FIRST’s competitions — all created by students — feature advanced coding and robotic design, including pneumatics and a pincer hand that can pick up a ball. A few students have patented things they’ve designed or started businesses based on items they’ve created in the course of making their robots.

It’s that kind of creativity that she hopes efforts like elementary school technology labs can inspire in the future.

Changing the way kids think

Not everything in the Bluejacket-Flint makerspace is high-tech, but all the activities have a similar goal — changing the way kids think about creating something.

Getting to that point might mean creating your own carnival games out of cardboard like 8-year-old Arlie Baker.

“It was really neat, because they had to create it on their own,” said Jamie Baker, Arlie’s mom. “A lot of projects, you take it home, and there ends up being a lot of parent help.”

Her other daughter, 11-year-old Kayla, has had more experience with the technology side of the makerspace.

“(Kayla) was telling me about an independent robots thing. It was in pieces, and she put it together. She followed the directions, and it moved — it was something she never thought she could do,” said Baker. “I think it’s independent learning. It’s individualized for them, and it’s a different way of learning. (Teachers ask), ‘What do you want to create?’ (and say), ‘Let’s see if we can do it.’ ”

Both girls transfer into the school from Kansas City, Kan., and their mom is pleased with the impact she’s seen the makerspace lessons have so far.

“My oldest daughter was telling me how she built this robot—it was the confidence (she showed me). It’s kind of amazing. It’s something I never would imagined she would gain from this,” said Baker. “It creates an excitement for learning and wanting to learn more.”

She likes that her daughters are learning independent thinking, especially when it comes to technology.

“I’m not very good at that (technological) stuff, so that’s not something I can teach them at home,” Baker said. “Realizing they can do it (is huge) — normally, in a kid’s view, this is untouchable, and the makerspace is showing them that yes, they can. It’s hands-on learning. Instead of opening a book and reading about it, they’re touching these things. It shows you that these things can happen.”

This story was originally published November 8, 2016 at 7:00 AM with the headline "Learning coding? Building robots? It’s elementary — elementary school, that is."