Inside the first-of-its-kind computer science class Antioch High offers with Stanford

There's a word floating around among students and staff at Antioch High School lately: Stantioch.

Teacher Andrew Becker proudly coined the term after the school partnered with Stanford University to offer a dual enrollment course teaching students the basics of computer science, along with coding and programming. On Thursday, the students huddled in small groups as they worked through a review for their upcoming final. The class has been rigorous for the 13 enrolled, mostly seniors with a few underclassmen peppered in.

Not only are they the first cohort to tackle the course, called Introduction to Computer Science, they're also the first-ever high schoolers in Tennessee to take any Stanford course. If they meet all the requirements for the course, they can transfer the credit either to Stanford or another college or university if they decide to pursue higher education.

By the end of the class, they learned the basics of how computers and the internet function, along with introductory HTML and Python skills.

Thariq Ridha, who graduated from Stanford in 2021 and went on to a Silicon Valley job at Roblox, helps lead the class virtually as a teaching fellow.

"It's so daunting from the outside," Ridha said. "It's like magic."

One of his favorite parts of teaching is watching students push through and really start to learn how computers work and interact with things like HTML code and programming languages like Python. In essence, the class teaches students to think and talk like a computer.

Ridha teamed up with Becker this semester, who oversaw the class in person, and taught virtually alongside Stanford lecturer Patrick Young. Becker and the students were able to ask questions in real-time via their virtual chat or over the audio feed. They also used screen sharing as they learned.

Throughout the course, students were given the same workload, assignments and exams as undergraduates taking the class at Stanford. That translates to hours of homework and a project-heavy syllabus, which can be a tall order on top of the regular coursework and extracurriculars for high schoolers.

But that challenge is also what drew seniors Edom Abbaoli, Jayson Molitor, Kevin Garrido and Sarah Yousef to try their hand at the inaugural semester of the course.

An 'extra little super power'

Aside from the core skills they learned in the class, all four seniors agreed it also taught them another valuable skill: time management. They came away with a sense of empowerment and confidence from the challenges they overcame and the hard work they put in this semester.

Abbaoli, 17, said she is considering college but not sure where she'll land or what she may pursue. She's thinking either international relations or computer science. Either way, she's thankful for what she learned in the class.

"It gave me that extra little super power," she said. "I always have it in my back pocket."

For Molitor, taking the course gave him a sense of what college-level work would be like and convinced him to apply to several regional universities, with plans to study computer science. Garrido echoed that thought, and also said the course helped him sharpen his editing and writing skills through the projects he submitted. He hopes to study computer engineering in college, with a keen interest in software development.

Yousef was already set on going to college, with applications out to several universities — including Stanford. She's deciding between studying biology, possibly leading to a focus on dermatology, or (you guessed it) computer science.

Nekesha Burnette, the school's executive principal, said there's been a lot of excitement among the teaching staff, administrators and students alike over the new course, which drew 13 students this semester.

She recalled a day she sat in on the class and asked a student if he understood everything happening on the screen as they coded. He confidently told her he did.

"To hear the professor ask questions and see my babies answer those questions ..." Burnette said, stopping short as her proud smile grew wider.

Dual enrollment options grow at MNPS

Metro Nashville Public Schools also partnered with Howard University to offer an environmental science course at Maplewood High School this semester. The partnership with Stanford and Howard also includes the National Educational Equity Lab, a nonprofit that works to bring classes with college credits to historically underserved communities nationwide.

Districtwide, MNPS offers 63 dual enrollment courses that expose students to college coursework and earn them transferable college credits. A total of 1,000 MNPS students took the courses across 16 high schools this semester. Those numbers do not include what the district's charter schools offer, according to MNPS spokesperson Sean Braisted. The courses vary widely, with offerings in everything from English composition to anatomy and physiology.

Learn more about the district's dual enrollment options, along with other parts of its college and career readiness program, at mnps.org/learn/academics/college_career_readiness.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Nashville high schoolers, Stanford pioneer computer science class