A new project aims to turn a dozen Maine school districts into regional computer science hubs that will train neighboring districts how to prepare students for the modern workforce.
The Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance has received an $8.2 million grant from the Harold Alfond Foundation to train about 1,000 educators in the state and reach 20,000 students over the next five years. Some of the teachers will tour businesses relying on computer science and find ways to fuse the discipline with their classroom lessons. Those might include activities where elementary students learn the basics of algorithms or program motorized Lego blocks.
The Augusta-based nonprofit hopes those involved in the regional hubs will train 30 districts over the next five years.
The STEM Workforce Ready project builds on Maine’s efforts to expand computer science education across grade levels, which includes sending more than 1,000 mobile labs for coding, robotics and other subjects to 166 districts since mid-2022. As more industries rely on technology, students need to be equipped with relevant skills to contribute to the workforce, said Ruth Kermish-Allen, executive director at the Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance.
“We’re trying to open up an understanding of what the future STEM workforce in rural Maine is going to look like and the kinds of skills needed for those roles,” she said.
The project isn’t about getting more computers into rural schools, but rather leveraging technology to learn in more engaging ways that align with a modern workforce, she said. That will prepare students for jobs ranging from engineering at Texas Instruments to running saw mills at Hammond Lumber Co.
Jennifer Trowbridge, who teaches fourth grade at Ellsworth Elementary Middle School, is among the educators experimenting with how to build more computer science into everyday lessons. Her students are particularly drawn to Sphero indi, a robotic toy car that uses colored tiles to teach students how to give instructions to a computer. They are tasked with telling the car to speed up or slow down, travel a certain distance and drive around a table.
Trowbridge likes seeing her students get excited about using various tools because even when a problem is difficult to solve, they are motivated to find answers rather than intimidated by a task. That’s a skill that they’ll need as they go through life, and it’s important to develop it early on, she said.
“One of the biggest benefits to doing this is letting kids be problem solvers,” she said. “Don’t just let the computer solve the problem for me, but figure out how to use the computer to help me solve the problem.”
Eighth-grade students in Bar Harbor made a 3D mitochondria cell out of styrofoam, then programmed different parts to light up as ribosomes travel through the cell, Kermish-Allen said. In Bethel, a kindergarten class was given a grid with different characters. By drawing arrows pointing up, down, left and right, they had to demonstrate how a money bag would get to each character, which was a simplified way of writing an algorithm.
Businesses aren’t necessarily looking for young people who are experts in coding, but they want people who can think critically, solve problems and collaborate, which is what these activities are designed to do, she said.
The Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance’s work on the project began before the COVID-19 pandemic, when the organization received a small grant from the National Science Foundation to study how computer science could take off in Maine’s rural schools, where resources and funding for a position dedicated to STEM or computer science tends to be limited.
More urban parts of the state, like Bangor and Portland, have bigger tax bases and resources that allow their students more opportunities. But some rural communities haven’t had any access to computer science in their classrooms, Kermish-Allen said.
“It was a topic that other states were doing work on, but it was minimally researched and understood in Maine,” Kermish-Allen said. “We knew we needed to find ways to integrate computer science into the existing curriculum.”
In 2021, the organization used a $1 million grant from the Harold Alfond Foundation to dive into solutions. About 40 teachers met in-person and virtually to look at how schools around the country have incorporated computer science into their curriculum. Then they designed their own lessons for students in pre-kindergarten through eighth grade and began testing them.
The program, which launches this summer, will expand those efforts by training more teachers and including high school students. There will be 50 lead educators who will be responsible for training 1,000 others over the next five years.
Seven school districts in Bethel, Ellsworth, Lincoln, Mount Desert Island, Rangeley, Rumford and Turner have committed to becoming regional hubs that will train from two to three nearby districts over time.
Educators will network, share ideas and participate in workshops during a CS Summer of Fun event from July 29 through Aug. 2 at the University of Maine in Orono. The Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance and Portland-based Educate Maine are hosting the week of professional development.
Educate Maine is also organizing trips for teachers to visit employers around the state, which are likely to start in October. They will tour the facilities and hear from leaders about the qualities and skills they’re looking for when hiring. Some teachers may even be assigned to a company for a two-week externship where they shadow workers and find a way to use what they’ve learned in the classroom, said Angela Oechslie, a program director at Educate Maine.
Access to computer science in K-12 classrooms “levels the playing field for students, increases their confidence and gives them a pathway to good jobs in Maine,” she said.
As the project evolves, the idea is to make a lesson plan that works in Ellsworth accessible to a teacher in Presque Isle so nobody needs to reinvent the wheel, Kermish-Allen noted.
“We hope this project is an initial step in what’s going to become a much larger initiative for reform across the state,” she said. “We see this growing over time.”