Kingsley – Northwest Iowa
COMPUTE TO COMPETE: 12 ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS BLAZE A TRAIL
Planning and implementation are well under way for 12 awarded Computer Science is Elementary schools, a joint project of the Iowa Department of Education and the Governor’s STEM Advisory Council. For Kingsley-Pierson Elementary, students are already building confidence in computer science after only a couple months of implementing computer science into the elementary curriculum.
As a former high school business teacher for Kingsley-Pierson High School, Erin Chute was aware of the many careers that involve computer science skills so she began teaching them in her classroom. The Coding Buddies program was formed to partner high school students with elementary students and introduce computer science at a young age. With the computer science skills elementary students were learning early on, Chute knew curriculum would need to be developed to continue to grow and teach new computer science skills to students as they moved on to the next grade level.
