Pinevale Elementary School kicked off “Code The Classroom” earlier this month with 18 third-grade students, who have just the right amount of curiosity and excitement to program and invent their own creations.

Code The Classroom is an innovative, in-class enrichment program that provides instructors, equipment, and hands-on curriculum in order to lessen the pressure on teachers who may not have a computer science background and are willing to introduce coding into their classroom of students.

The program is designed to plant the necessary seeds within students to become familiar with coding and competitive in the future workforce. Therefore, the weekly, hour-long sessions are ideal for school classrooms and individual students that range in academic subject and performance, according to the press release.

During the program, students have an opportunity to learn to control image, sound, and motion using project-based coding kits. They use loops to make animations and conditional logic to program rules into their games.

The top sponsor for Pinevale’s third-grade classroom is South Georgia Medical Center, who strongly believes in providing the means to encourage students to embrace their creativity.

By the end of the program, students are featured in a presentation of their final product with their peers and invited classroom sponsors.

Kayla Brown, Gifted Teacher at Pinevale Elementary School, who hosts the program and third-grade students in her classroom, says the students are enthusiastic and eager to learn within the program. 

"Watching them engage and create with the bits is truly exciting. I enjoy watching them develop, and the reactions on their faces when they've completed a task or function is absolutely the best."

Brown feels that having the program in classrooms allows students to become more creative, pushes for collaboration, teaches them how to communicate, and requires students to think.

"It allows them to learn through play, and this is what keeps them engaged and more willing to learn new and exciting things," stated Brown.

Code the Classroom is made possible by the H. DeWayne and Amanda Johnson BridgeBuilder Education Foundation. The program partners with any classroom that requests and a sought-out set of classroom sponsors in order to conduct a multi-week curriculum using coding kits.