Coding Is Child's Play At Ocean City Primary School

Ocean City, NJ – Coding can seem high-tech for some, but for others, it’s child’s play.

Students in kindergarten through third-grade at the Ocean City Primary School have learned coding, among other skills, in a new class dubbed the OC Tech Lab.

The program has taken the place of computers class, and although it still teaches traditional topics such as typing, new Ocean City teacher Randall Kohr, who leads the program, said the students now are doing much more.

“Our new primary technology program introduces students to emerging technologies as early as possible to get them excited about STEM-related fields and build fundamental skills within robotics, computer programming, 3D printing, and design thinking,” Kohr said.

STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

In the first few months of the school year, students already have been coding and learning robotics programming.

Using funding from the Parent Teacher Association, Kohr ordered eight robots that students will program during a challenge as part of Computer Science Education Week, Dec. 5-11.

Second- and third-grade students soon will launch the rockets they are in the final stages of building using the lab’s 3D printer for NASA’s Journey to Mars Rocket Challenge.

“We are exposing our students at this age to innovative experiences to get them interested in STEM from the start of their education,” Ocean City Superintendent of Schools Dr. Kathleen Taylor said. “We want our students to have hands-on experiences and learn an engineering design process, and they love it. We also want to ensure our students are aware of college opportunities and careers in the STEM field.”

Kohr also had a hand in organizing a visit from a virtual reality bus - the zSpace bus - to the school on Nov. 17.
The company created a new interactive virtual reality computer that allows the user to pick up and manipulate virtual images as if they were real, incorporating hundreds of lessons often found in teachers’ curricula.

Primary School students used stations on the bus to view the different parts of a human heart and the life stages of a butterfly, for example.

“Second- and third-graders enjoyed the zSpace bus, which visited the school last week, as it added a virtual dimension to what they already are learning in our Ocean City Primary School classrooms,” Taylor said.

The attached images were provided by the Ocean City School District:
Photo 1 – Ocean City Primary School student Kalyn Baron views the parts of the human heart during a visit from the zSpace bus to the school on Thursday, November 17.
Photo 2 – Second- and third-graders from Ocean City Primary School, including Caylee Borman and Suzy Bautista-Rodriguez, partnered-up and wore special glasses in order to interact with the zSpace bus.
Photo 3 – Randall Kohr, Ocean City Primary School OC Tech Lab teacher, stands with the rocket launcher his students will use to test their creations for NASA’s Journey to Mars Rocket Challenge.