Capturing codes: New England 7th graders learn web design

Jason R. O'Day, The Dickinson Press, N.D.
·3 min read

Mar. 1—NEW ENGLAND, N.D. — Shannay Witte is the technology coordinator and a math teacher at New England Public School. She instructs a seventh grade class called Computer Science Discoveries. Last semester she taught this course for a class of 12 seventh grade girls and this semester is a similarly sized class of seventh grade boys. The boys are learning how to create applications used to make video games.

"I have the boys right now and we're doing app development. They're learning all about sprites and animation," Witte said. "Sprites are the little characters on your screen. So like when you're in a video game, and you have a little character he's called a sprite. And sprites can then have attributes. So like this sprite can be at a certain position with a certain rotation with a certain costume... Then you control all their attributes as you animate them and work through your game."

For their final project the boys will be creating a scene after they learn more about story development. The girls made their own websites. Seventh grader Taylor Sonsalla said the coding process is a little more complex than she anticipated.

"Typing out the whole code itself, like figuring out the tags and stuff, how to get it all to work correctly; that definitely took a lot of time," Sonsalla said. "The coolest part about it was like, when it was all done we got to see that we made that and it was just really fun getting to learn how to put it all together. You know that you did that yourself. And that was pretty cool."

Sonsalla created two separate web pages about the fashion industry and Nike. She is also active on the volleyball team. Her friend Ayrison Magelky made pages about cows and other large farm animals. Then the entire class worked together on a page detailing each of America's original 13 colonies. All of these can be found on the school website at

nepstigers.com/page/computer-science-discoveries.

Witte is no stranger to the screen.

"I've been teaching computer science for 33 years. And I also teach for the North Coast Center for Distance Education. So I've taught HTML stuff in different forms many times," she said. "The basic underpinnings stay the same. But they have definitely added to it, you know, with JavaScript and those sorts of things over time."

Code.org is an educational nonprofit dedicated to fulfilling their vision of providing every student in every school the opportunity to learn computer science as part of their core K-12 education. So far their Hour of Code campaign has purportedly engaged more than 15% of school children worldwide. The endeavor is supported by donations from tech companies such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google among others.

"It's a joint project that's supported by some of these big companies, because they want people to get into computer science," Witte said. "So it's exciting stuff. Like I said, you know, they just get a taste of what you can do with computers and with coding. See if that's somewhere you want to go with your career."

She added that next year New England's younger Tigers will have the same Ozobots as Dickinson Public Schools. The

Ozobots

are small robotic balls that move across a piece of paper in different ways based on the color and trajectory of lines. They have other uses outside of STEM that will help engage students with their curriculum.