An engineering classroom
that runs in English
Eight years, from age six to the end of elementary school. A child makes things, first with her hands and later in code, and explains them in English. Coding, learned in English.
Courses
The same five steps, all eight years
From a six-year-old's block tower to a twelve-year-old's code, the five steps are the same. Only the material changes: wooden blocks, copper tape, blocks on a screen, then code.
What's different
The English always has a job to do
Lessons run entirely in English, and the words taught each day are the ones that day's task needs. Say it clearly and the right thing comes back. Spell it right and the program runs.
Eight years, one piece of work
These are not separate courses. The order and prediction a child practises in play at SEED gets called coding at SPARK, becomes a block program at MAKER, and is written in Python at CODER. Each stage builds on what she can already do.
Guess first, and say so when you were wrong
Before anything runs, she says what she expects and writes it down. If the result is different, she says so out loud instead of quietly fixing the note. The habit is the same from mixing colours to reading code, and much of her spoken English comes from it.
Screens only where they are needed
The first years are hands and voices. A child first works a screen at SPARK, and even then only in the lessons that need one.
What she makes goes home
What she builds by hand goes home in her hands. What she writes in code goes home as her own file. Either way, it is hers to keep.
There is somebody to show it to
Every six months we hold a Demo Day. The child stands beside what she made and explains, in English, what it does and what she changed along the way.
Stage by stage
Ages 6–7 · 4 courses × 6 months · 2 × 60 min a week
Four courses, eight rungs of sentence. Describe it exactly and give an instruction. State a rule and compare two things. Count, show the evidence and say why. Plan it, say what you changed, then explain it to somebody who was not there.
The class runs on making and testing: mixing colours, talking a friend through an obstacle course, measuring shadows onto a chart, doing a recipe in the wrong order on purpose. She is not sitting through an English lesson. She is getting something done in English.
What a six-year-old needs is not more words. It is the experience of getting what she wants with the words she has.
Grades 1–2 · 4 courses × 6 months · 1 × 90 min a week
Order, repetition, conditions: the ideas coding is built on, learned by hand. With batteries and switches, with a floor robot, with levers, gears and motors, and with devices that put them together.
Children build with their hands and take what they build home: a pocket light, a buzzer card, a game where the wire must not be touched, an animation of her own name, a lifting machine, a pop-up animal house, a biscuit-tin fortune teller, a guard box. What gets built depends on the course; these are a few examples.
The first screen appears here. Until then, coding is learned with her body, with paper, and with a robot on the floor.
Grades 3–4 · 4 courses × 6 months · 1 × 120 min a week
Programs written in blocks: order, conditions, variables and loops, then lists, text and speech. With a micro:bit connected, her program reads light, sound and tilt sensors and acts on the readings.
The things she builds add up. A few examples: an animation of a character she drew, a stage show, a story that changes with the viewer's choice, a controller she presses by hand, a meter that draws a chart of what it measures, a machine that asks your name and answers, a board that talks, and a game of her own. What gets built changes with the course; these are a few of them.
She reads a program somebody else wrote, finds where it goes wrong, changes one thing and runs it again. Reading and fixing errors is not a side skill here. It is the lesson.
A child who played games now makes them. The result of this stage is a game somebody else can sit down and play.
Grades 5–6 · 4 courses × 6 months · 1 × 120 min a week
Python. Instead of dragging blocks, she types code in a real programming language. Everything in the code is English, so this is the stage where she reads and writes the most English of all.
Over the four courses, useful programs pile up. A few examples: a program that asks questions and remembers the answers, a game a friend can play, a data story built from numbers she collected herself, a mood lamp that comes on when the room gets dark, a car that follows a line on the floor, a machine that recognises a hand gesture, a model she trained on her own data. What gets built changes with the course; these are a few of them.
From the third course, programs leave the laptop: her code switches on the lamp and drives the car, and the device is hers to keep. In the last course she finishes a piece of her own, with a guide and a history, so that somebody else could pick it up, read it and run it.
A child who built in blocks at MAKER writes in a real language here. What she takes away is a set of programs she wrote herself, and a device of her own to run them on.
Meet Adriana
She teaches every lesson herself, entirely in English. She is also fluent in Korean, so she can help in Korean when a child gets stuck.
- BA, Yonsei University
- MSc Artificial Intelligence, University College London
- Research experience at KAIST
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