Coding System Comes to the Coast

Robots, coding, and programming all seem like foreign concepts to many adults but a classroom full of fifth graders at Ocean Springs Upper Elementary makes it all look simple.
News 25’s Laurene Callander caught up with these tech wizards on what it’s like to be the first students in Mississippi to use a coding system.
What seems like a simple voice command actually comes from a coding program. You may assume a team of expert computer engineers is behind it but it’s actually a group of tech savvy fifth graders at Ocean Springs Upper Elementary. Fifth grade teacher and Coding Club supervisor Melissa Sundberg said, “They have to take a sprite, which is just an animated figure on the screen, and what they do with it is they make it move whatever the directions are telling them to do. They have to figure it out and what’s cool about Google is they provide a ‘how to’ video prior to them actually doing any of the coding themselves.”
These students are the first in the state to join Google’s free coding program “Computer Science First”. They learn about animation through cartoons and movies and actually direct the subjects on the computer to move or speak. “It takes all the subjects that we teach every day, science, math, English, language arts, and history, and it combines them and shows integration so that they’re able to do it live with the coding,” said Sundberg.
Fifth grader Ashley Davis said, “We treat them like they’re humans and we always play with them, like me and my friend always go outside sometimes during recess to go mess with them and they have levels on them too, sort of like this almost and it’s really cool.”
There are about 30 students in this club but with the positive feedback and skills they are building through this program, Ocean Springs Upper Elementary hopes to add even more students to this high tech group. “I love this club, I love computer science. I wanna learn lots more about it,” said Davis.

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