Students get new tool to learn critical computer skills

Fort Smith students will learn programming skills throughout year on small computers

Published: November 24, 2014

By Maryanne Meyerriecks
Fort Smith Correspondent

Maryanne Meyerriecks

Anthony Castillo (left), Arturo Jaime and Bentley Mashburn (right), sixth-graders at St. Boniface School in Fort Smith, assemble their Raspberry Pi cases Nov. 11 at KMF Metal Fabrication during a field trip to tour the plant.

Maryanne Meyerriecks

FORT SMITH — Like children all over the world, St. Boniface School sixth-graders recently received their Raspberry Pi.

“They’re an early graduation gift — and much more,” principal Dr. Karen Hollenbeck said.

The inexpensive, credit card-sized computers can be used for electronics projects, spreadsheets, word processing and games. They are also being used to teach programming to children around the world.

The gifts were received last week from the school’s educational partner, KMF Metal Fabrication, during an on-site visit to the plant.

Christy and David Koprovic, co-owners of KMF and parents of nine children who have attended or will attend St. Boniface School, became interested in Raspberry Pi after attending the Arkansas Jobs Summit Conference and learning that by 2022, only 23 percent of jobs will require a bachelor’s degree or advanced degree. Technology is moving into an “anticipatory” stage in which many jobs — secretarial, accounting, technical writing, economics and others —will be replaced by algorithms written by computers. Jobs in 2022 will be focused on manufacturing, agriculture, construction and trucking, they said.

“We wanted to launch a year-long project with sixth graders that would allow them to see how computers are used in our shop and how things are made, to help them understand how important computers are to any future career they will have,” Christy Koprovic said. “Running Windows, playing games and writing reports are not the applications that will help them in the future.”

When the sixth graders arrived at KMF with Hollenbeck and teacher Rebecca Kaelin, Christy Koprovic greeted them at the door and gave each student a Raspberry Pi in a little bag. The Pi looks like a tiny motherboard with all the circuitry exposed, and KMF had designed transparent, personalized cases that the students could assemble at the factory. Koprovic showed them how the case design was programmed into a laser cutter which cut enough case parts for all the Pis from one large plastic sheet. After giving the class a factory tour highlighting how computers are used in the manufacturing process, she brought them upstairs to assemble their Pi cases.

“We want the students to realize that the skills they are learning now are crucial for the things they will be doing in the future,” Koprovic said. “Knowing how to code a computer and telling it what you need it to do will be a valuable skill as we look at future jobs and education.”

Although a Raspberry Pi can be hooked up to a keyboard, mouse and monitor and used for traditional desktop applications, it is designed to be programmed by its users. The non-profit Raspberry Pi Foundation, headquartered in the United Kingdom, was formed when its founders saw that while students in the 1990s came to university as experienced hobbyist programmers, a 21st century student might have only done a little web design. The way kids interacted with computers had changed, and the Raspberry Pi designers wanted to design a small, affordable computer so that every child could practice and develop coding skills.

The Koprovics will be team-teaching programming skills to the sixth graders once a week, bringing mentors from the plant to assist at each session. Christy Koprovic is a former St. Boniface teacher, but husband David is the real techie of the pair.

“I like the idea that the Raspberry Pi uses open source software,” David Koprovic said. “Computers are great tools, but only if the people using them know what to do.”

Hollenbeck said she is excited about the Raspberry Pi’s potential in every area of the curriculum.

“The Raspberry Pis meet many of the sixth-grade standards in lots of different subject areas, including math (problem solving and critical thinking), science (information gathering skills, using the scientific method, predicting outcomes, recognizing cause and effect, and many others), language (listening skills, sharing information, developing new vocabulary).”