Last week in President Barack Obama’s final State of the Union address, he envisioned a future where all students in the U.S. learned computer science. That future is beginning in Tuluksak where 21 iPads are being shipped to the Kuskokwim school to teach coding.
In December Tuluksak seventh- and eighth-grade teacher Katherine Garrison saw a Facebook post asking teachers worldwide to include an hour of code in the school day.
“And I did, because my kids love to be on the computers. I thought that would be kind of cool,” Garrison said.
Hour of Code is a one-hour introductory computer science tutorial offered by the free website Code.org, a non-profit devoted to increasing computer science education by making it available in schools. The event occurred during national Computer Science Education Week in mid-December. One school from each state, and from Washington D.C., received $10,000 worth of computers. In Alaska, Tuluksak took the prize.
“So we’ll be able to use them for the coding,” Garrison said. “We’ll also be able to use them for everything else that you can use a computer for. We’ll have computers in the room, so we can do research projects and learn about current events and probably play a few games if we’re going to be honest.”
Garrison says her class will code for an hour every Friday using Code.org and use the iPads for research during the rest of the week.
“Now they’re confined to what they can find in the library because we can’t get a lot of computer time,” Garrison said. “But this will open it up so they can get more current and relevant information.”
Garrison says the school currently holds 19 computers for its 140 students. She said the school spent the prize money on iPads because tablets use less broadband than laptops.
“We have very limited and very narrow abilities to get onto the Internet. So, if you have too many computers, then the whole system crashes down. And the whole village gets in on our Internet,” Garrison said.
Garrison says the iPad influx will change how she’s able to teach and the coding will create new job opportunities for her students.
“What’s really cool about this is Tuluksak along with a lot of the other remote village area schools, the kids don’t necessarily want to leave home, but they do want to make a lot of money. Computer science— designing these applications— they can do anywhere. They just have to have a computer,” Garrison said.
The iPads should arrive this week.
Anna Rose MacArthur is a reporter at KYUK in Bethel.
