Highland Park Students Start Coding Mentorship Program to Promote STEM Learning

Earlier this school year, Highland Park students represented the largest single-district delegation of Chief Science Officers (CSOs) in the United States at a meeting for the Leadership Training Institute (LTI). These students gathered for one mission: to move beyond being just students of science and become advocates for it. After months of planning, collaborating with industry professionals, and setting goals, Highland Park’s Chief Science Officers are seeing their visions come to life.

At Highland Park Elementary, the CSO’s action plan focuses on pipeline development, where older students mentor younger ones to create a continuous path of interest in STEM. The sixth-grade team took their idea and turned it into a coding mentorship program. The CSOs are now visiting kindergarten through third-grade classrooms with Botley robots, which are designed to teach the fundamentals of coding without the need for a screen. They challenge the younger students to build physical mazes and then write code to navigate the robots through them. While the younger students learn the basics of logic and sequence, our CSOs have experienced a significant boost in their own self-confidence. One student reflected on the surprise of discovering their own potential, saying, “Something that I learned about myself is how good I am at speaking in front of a really big crowd... I never really knew that I could talk that well in front of that many people.”

To learn more about student learning and activities at Highland Park, schedule a tour at HighlandPark.GilbertSchools.net/Tour!