VERO BEACH — In an aging classroom jammed with kids at low tables, Scott Bartel broke out of the hovering ring of teachers and volunteers to huddle over his 10-year-old son Oliver. Like the rest of the kids, both stared at a computer screen.
For an instant, it looked like Angry Birds, or another mindless game for kids. On closer inspection though, the screen was split. While half showed a grid with a moving cartoon creature, on the other half was a page of instructions in computer shorthand.
Pointing at the left screen with his finger, Oliver counted up squares on a path he wanted his creature to follow. Then moving his cursor to the other screen, he hunt-and-pecked an order and with a click of the mouse, entered it.
Oliver just wrote a line of computer code. With his dad’s gentle coaching and a basic computer language known as Blockly, he has told the computer critter what to do next time, ad infinitum, by listing the moves and turns to get his critter to the goal.
Move forward. Turn right. If the coast is clear, turn right three more times. Coding is the fundamental skill of computer programming. The next time Oliver goes to his grid, the little critter will act on its own, moving and turning in exactly the way Oliver has ordained.
“I hesitate to say ‘baby steps’ because it’s the real deal, but in a much more digestible way,” says Bartel, whose resume reveals tech companies like layers of ancient earth: Learning Company, Mindscape, Earthlink.
That week in December, Oliver and his classmates joined 77 million kids around the globe in showing computers who’s boss, taking part in an international Hour of Code.
Just beyond the kids’ intense focus on their monitors, a large screen filled one end of the cramped room. As a teacher fidgeted with controls, it came to life with the faces of President Obama, Mark Zuckerman, Bill Gates and a slew of pop celebrities, all of whom claimed to plot their own critters’ paths in the international Hour of Code.
It was the second year in a row that Beachland took part in the event, seized on by a parent, Paige Visser, who encouraged the school to pilot the program for third graders last year. This year, Visser corralled her close friends and fellow Beachland parents, Scott and Sybil Bartel, and made it happen for the entire student body, about 600 kids.
To coach the kids, Bartel signed up some colleagues at Spectorsoft, the software company based in Vero with offices in West Palm Beach and London. The company, which develops, makes and markets surveillance software designed to monitor computer use in business, government and schools, founded by Doug Fowler in 1998 and now owned by a private equity firm, has 100 employees and does over $20 million in sales annually. It has been listed by Inc. magazine as one of the fastest-growing companies in the U.S.
Bartel found Spectorsift after his father-in-law, a professor at University of Florida, suggested they move to the Treasure Coast to be closer.
“We made a phone call, we loved them and they loved us.” He just celebrated 11 years with the Vero-based company.
“As the only technology company in this area, we jumped at the opportunity to be able to represent computer science to these kids,” said Bartel, who organized the Spectorsoft volunteers with the company’s vice president of engineering, David Smith. Smith also has a child at Beachland.
“Oliver just has an aptitude for computers and all things techy,” says Bartel. “He’s a gadget hound like his father.”
Even the father of a boy like Oliver was surprised at the level of query that came from the students at last year’s Hour of Code. ”Some of the questions we got, we were not prepared for due to their sophistication, and that showed the program itself had really struck a chord,” Bartel said. “They were asking some very, very intelligent questions regarding computer science. That’s not something kids are exposed to until they go out and do it on their own.”
For a school that opened in the mid-1950s, Beachland has limped along the information highway – if anyone remembers that phrase. Its pre-tech construction left a number of dead zones in terms of wifi, most of which have finally been addressed with signal boosters.
This year, fifth graders were allowed to bring tablets to school and use a password to get onto the school’s network. And recently, the PTA pulled together enough money to buy laptops for the school’s computer lab.
It also helped fund makeshift smart boards (think computer touch screen projected onto a white board) for teachers to use with the class. The county’s lower-income Title One schools, so designated by how many kids need free or reduced lunches, get smart boards through the federal government. Beachland has many families from lower income mainland neighborhoods including Gifford. But it also has island families of significant affluence. That makes it the most economically diverse school in the county – a good thing, according to administrators. But because of that, it doesn’t qualify as Title One.
And the affluence doesn’t trickle down into the classroom, at least, not until the PTA steps in. That’s how the smart board shortage was addressed.
When Caroline Barker, a self-described techy who became the school’s principal in 2012, went to a workshop a couple of years ago, she came back with a concept: a way to use infra-red pens or wands and Wii remotes, from the same Wii games that let you box or surf with a TV monitor, and that rely on reading infrared light.
The PTA split the cost with the school – $125 a classroom, and the software developer threw in the wands for free.
“We live in an interactive world,” says Barker. “We want to make school interactive for the students, too.”
She looks to the day when all students have their own personal devices that, by snapping a photo of a barcode-like password, can join in on the teacher’s smart board. She believes some 60 to 70 percent of kids have phones or devices. How to supply the rest with devices is still up in the air, but the answer might come from another 21st century device: Facebook. The Beachland PTA updates its page regularly with not only classroom events but fundraisers and needs.
Barker says expectations have risen for Florida’s kids. “We’re reading in kindergarten now,” she says, attributing much of the change to access to computers and the Internet. “They’re exposed to more reading.”
Barker started the year with great news: preliminary results from the state showed Beachland had raised its letter grade from “C” to its customary “A”, a rise of 26 percentage points in reading learning. “We went through a lot of changes last year that paid off. We gained our A back. And really, change is good,” she says.
Now Beachland is brainstorming with another elementary school, Citrus, on implementing a new reading program in kindergarten. Teachers from the two schools meet at Christ-by-the-Sea Methodist Church to share information each has received at workshops, as well as confer on their classroom experiences.
“We’re kind of the first (in the county) to do that,” says Barker.
The state’s tougher standards require learning “with increased rigor – teaching kids to be self-starters and problem solvers and thinkers,” she says.
“You go to our classrooms today, it’s noisy, there’s movement,” says Regina Davis, a long-time Beachland kindergarten teacher who moved to first grade this year.
Davis, who is a walking lava flow of ideas for her kids, serves as the designated teacher for first-grade math in the school’s STEM program, a national effort to ramp up learning in science, technology, engineering and math. Since last year, Beachland students at all levels go to different teachers for specialized subjects.
While other teachers share methods face to face, Davis is doing it online, designing and selling her own curriculum aides on a website, a sort of Etsy.com for teachers.
Just the day before, she posted a long lesson plan that has kids building trains out of cookies, candy and frosting. “They learn cardinality, they learn two-dimensional and three-dimensional. They learn circle, triangle and rectangle. And they make a graph of how many there are of each,” she says, flipping through page after page of notes and photos. “After they ask the entire class a question about their graph, they get to eat a little bit of train.”
Davis designs her lesson plan in the evenings, though she herself is a busy mother of four. She views it a side job, a way to supplement her teacher’s salary.
“I posted it yesterday and I already sold three. People buy it and use it in their classrooms. My stuff has been purchased by people from other countries.”
While Beachland hurtles toward a technology-enhanced future, Oliver Bartel is getting by with less than a lot of his peers. His parents haven’t yet supplied him with a cell phone. Instead, Oliver has – and seems very content with – a device he says does everything an iPhone does, except make calls.
He explains this slowly, so the older adult listening can follow.
“It’s called an iPod,” says Oliver.