School in Park City introduces new resource to excite kids about coding

PARK CITY, Utah — There’s a push to get students more interested by teaching kids to code, through active play.

There’s a common sight and tool seen throughout the classrooms at Eckerhill Middle School in Park City that’s not as common in most schools.

“For this type of project we chose the rock cycle and we needed to answer questions using the Unruly Splat, it’s kind of like a game show,” said Summer Marshal, a sixth grade creative coding and computer science teacher.

A game show in science class, using coding? Here’s how it works.

“We used coding on the unrulysplats.com program so we coded the different splat pads to have different coding and actions for our game show.”

Jonah and Hudson made their own interactive quiz game for other students in their class from start to finish — coding it to get harder for correct answers and easier for wrong ones.

“You really have to use your thinking and your mind to come up with different algorithms and it’s just complicated but at the same time it’s fun and it’s challenging,” Jonah and Hudson said.

Park City School District recently introduced a new computer science education tool called “Unruly Splats.”

“It could be from making art to building robots to learning how to animate,” Marshal said.

It can also combine learning code with active, recess style-play.

“Students in their world today have so much technology in their day-to-day lives so to make things relevant to them and the engage them, we bring technology into the classrooms and we want them to be creators and not just consumers of technology,” Marshal said.

To be creators, “Unruly Splats” says learning how to code is a crucial 21st-century skill. The word “coding” doesn’t pique much interest to a sixth grader. “Coding with recess style play?” might pique more interest.

“When students are coding with the splats instead of watching a character move around on a screen, or a robot driving around the room, students are getting up and they are a core part of that creation,” Brian Handy, a senior account executive for Unruly Students said. “Sometimes you bring these tools into the classroom and students sometimes latch onto it more quickly than the teachers do because they do not have that fear or intimidation around technology.”

Whether it’s creating a personal website, online quiz, or coding a device to create a game in P.E., these kids at Ecker Hill are ahead of the curve.

“I want students to walk away with the confidence that they can do it,” Marshal said.

As for Jonah and Hudson? A bright future in computer science.

“I think I want to take some coding classes in high school,” they said. “Yeah, same.”