Photos by Olivia Charis
Coded campfire fireflies.
A summer Coding Camp has been teaching kids to make the game instead of playing it.
Over 320 New Haven students from various schools have gathered to do that in a July public schools program called SAM Labs Summer Camp.
At John Martinez School on Wednesday, rising 2nd and 3rd graders participated in the final week of the camp program, which brought together mathematics, literacy and coding.
The program is designed to help kids keep up with learning during the summer break, while also providing them with new skills.
Wednesday, the students’ task was to write code for a thunderstorm based on a spooky story they had been analyzing in class.
“Are we ready to start coding?” teacher Stephanie White asked the class.
White in the camp classroom.
An uproar of “yeses” launched the day’s lesson.
White mirrored her computer screen on the projector and walked the class through combining inputs, outputs, and behaviors to write the full code.
Students have learned over 50 lines of code in a single week, said White, who said she has been enjoying her time with the students.
Once the students wrote the code, teaching assistants went around the room to help connect sensors to their iPads to reveal the final artificially created thunderstorm.
“I did it! I did it!” exclaimed students one at a time as they each got to the final sensor portion of the activity.
“I know we’re all in different spots, and that’s the coolest thing about coding.” White encouraged. “Coding is never just done by yourself. You work as a team.”
“As a teacher this [program] has reinvigorated my experience,” White said about teaching this summer after a Covid-fueled high-pressure academic year. “This makes me want to keep teaching.”
Every activity also incorporates movement in the form of brain breaks and direction cues for different coding phrases.
“We connect literacy and math to everything we do,” White noted.
White, Stewart, and 14 other teachers from the New Haven district have been working with eight schools across the city to bring this program to kids and families.
Students coding
Xiomara Vazquez, a teacher at John Martinez who chose to help out with the program this summer, said she has enjoyed this process just as much as her students.
Her third graders were coding firefly lights Wednesday morning for campfire firefly jars. Trying to make the code for the fireflies to change colors was a challenge, Vazquez said, but when they figured it out, “Everyone was screaming. I was screaming with them.”
Sensors light up as a part of thunderstorm simulation.
SAM Lab kits
The SAM Lab software used in the program allows participants to change language settings. Instructors consistently transitioned into ELL students’ native languages like Spanish to help students along throughout each activity. One of her newer students from last year, Vasquez said, has benefited tremendously from this experience.
“This is helping him use words he’s never used before,” she said.
Kim Stewart, the coding instructor in charge of Vasquez’s classroom on Wednesday, worked through the four elements of a story (characters, setting, problem, solution) with students before walking them through how to code the fireflies’ sights and sounds from the spooky tale.
Ms. Stewart leading her class
“Once you write your story, you’re going to code the sound effects,” Stewart instructed the class.
“After the pandemic, the one thing the kids were good at was computers,” she noted in a conversation afterwards. “Instead of saying they are behind, we need to take this growth. This is our future.”
“Everything is run by computers now: Instead of playing games, we’re making them,” Stewart said.
Coming out of a year of online learning, some teachers were hesitant about having this program.
“I was worried at first that the kids would lose attention,” teacher Raina Mwenchetti said, but now she sees how engaged they have become.
“My favorite part is that you could do it with your friends and help people,” said second grader Adelle as she showed off her completed code.
Stewart teaching coding at John Martinez School Summer Camp.
We need more programs like this to help develop students love of learning in skill sets test will lead to good living wage careers. For student who struggle with literacy or math, this type of programming can win over students frustration and give them the satisfaction of success if they just stick with it and don’t get discouraged, while at the same time teaching literacy and math skills.