This September, seniors Lydia Sun and Shulie Weinberg created an Upper School coding club to incorporate more coding practice at Parker.

Sun and Weinberg attended a two-week long summer program at the Flatiron School in New York where they learned about coding and how to utilize their skills to create something such as a website or a game. From there, they were inspired to create a club at Parker community, according to Weinberg.

The Flatiron School gave them a curriculum to use for their club, which will begin by teaching basic topics such as HTML, a key component in creating a website. The topics will then branch out toward creating a website.

“Parker’s small enough that I was like, ‘I know that if I start a club, there’s going to be some interest,’” Weinberg said. “Coding is something that a lot of people are interested in, and I know that there are a lot of students who have had a lot of prior experience and who have made apps and crazy things like that.”

Last year, coding was introduced to students from first to eighth grades through the science department.

“One of the exciting things about coding and computer science is that it is something that can be useful to people for a variety of different reasons,” Middle School mathematics and science enrichment coordinator Adam Colestock said.   “I think people with different interests or passions can use and learn computer science to pursue something that’s interesting to them.”  

Computer science can assist in careers such as video production, to help create animations, and can help assist scientists in creating models. The majority of the people interested in learning coding are more fluent in technology than their peers and are also more comfortable with the subject, according to Colestock.

The coding trend has passed through other schools in Chicago such as the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. Students at Lab take computer science classes beginning in sixth grade where they begin to learn the basics of coding. This leads to creating smaller products such as basic videogames. The topic of coding is not visited again until freshman year.

High school students at Lab take more advanced computer science classes. In freshman year, they start to learn about HTML and create web pages, following a similar curriculum to the plan of Coding Club at Parker.

Parker has also added computer science classes taught by Upper School computer science teacher Aaron Lee, who is new to Parker this year.  

A current goal of Parker is to further introduce coding and programming through the science department.

“I think that the experiences that we are giving will have our students really prepared if they want to do any sort of career in computer science, or related to coding.” Lee said, “These days it’s hard to find any sort of field that doesn’t have some element of computer programming in it.”

Lee teaches three semester long classes including Physical Computing, Introduction to Programming, and Website Design and Development. This semester he has around 40 students in his classes, according to Lee.

The Physical Computing class is with Arduino microcontrollers in C language, which helps produce physical products from computer science. In the Introduction to Programming class, students learn about Python among other subjects that relate to coding. In the Website Design and Development class students learn about HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which are topics the Coding Club are currently covering.

“The programming class at Parker is a great opportunity to allow students to learn the basics of programming.” freshman Nathan Satterfield said, “I think it’s great that Parker has continued to expand it’s computer science program as programming is a skill that is great to have in life.”