Saint Mary's School is dedicated to academic excellence and personal achievement for girls. In today's complex and global 21st century, that means Saint Mary's is intentional about guiding girls to build the competencies they need to successfully navigate college and life – competencies like critical thinking, collaboration, cross-cultural intelligence and communication. Girls develop these and other competencies at Saint Mary's through a variety of hands-on educational programs, experiences and platforms including the use and study of current and emerging technologies.
This year, Saint Mary's is proud to be an official TEALS (Technology Education and Literacy in Schools) site and to offer a new introductory coding class. Funded by Microsoft Philanthropy, TEALS recruits, mentors, and places passionate high-tech professionals in high school classes to teach as volunteer instructors.
The one-semester course is based on the University of California-Berkeley course "The Beauty and Joy of Computing," and is adapted specifically for Saint Mary's School. Using Snap! visual programming language, girls are introduced to computational thinking and exposed to the basics of programming: loops, variables, lists, algorithms, data structures and recursive functions. The course is designed to lower the barrier of entry to the realm of computer science and makes it easy for students to delve more deeply into the essential components of programming, such as abstraction and event-listening. Quick experimentation and testing blocks of code are encouraged, and students are quickly able to create while learning the basic building blocks of programming. Saint Mary's mathematics instructor and former programmer Matthew Watson says "It's great to give the girls this experience with programming. They're having fun and they're good at it. It's important each girl knows this field is a viable option for her future."
The TEALS partnership connects students with industry experts from our area. Together with Watson, Brandon Perkins, a senior quality assurance engineer at Red Hat, and Brandon Florkey, a senior software engineer at LexisNexis, co-teach the coding class. By learning from and working with professionals in the field of computer science, girls not only learn how to code, but make important connections between what they are learning and its relevance to real-world applications. "Learning code is not just useful for future computer scientists," says Perkins, "it builds knowledge of logic, problem solving and a greater understanding of how our virtual world works." He adds, "I've found the girls' excitement for the material and expansion beyond the assignments to be truly refreshing. They demonstrate to me how communication and collaboration with one another really helps them learn the concepts and create functional software."
Throughout Saint Mary's program, opportunities abound for students to explore and utilize technologies in their learning. Whether it is expressing herself through the written word in a course-specific blog examining comparative literature, using Excel to design linear programming to solve a real-world problem in Algebra, learning code to create her own app, or working on a shared project through FaceTime with students thousands of miles away, every Saint Mary's girl has valuable opportunities to use technology to explore, innovate and discover.