Increasingly, technology is becoming an integral part of our society. We know that our children will need to understand, and be excited about understanding, new technologies so they are able to be successful in almost any career they choose in the future. Unfortunately, exposure to coding and other technology is limited to clubs, extra-curricular activities, personal time, and electives, so students who don't have any exposure to these skills are never given an opportunity to try them. As any educator knows, the unknown has a certain level of uncertainty and fear-of-failure for students. Because of this, certain classes which we have deemed essential for a student's future are required. At this time, it is essential we expose young students to coding in a fun and easy-to-understand manner to create excitement and an eagerness to learn more about these important skills. To help engender this excitement we have created a curriculum for beginning functional programming using the BERO Cell-Bot to provide a safe and fun environment for middle school students, who may have never had any experience with coding, to get over that initial fear of the unknown and generate interest in robotics and computers at an early age. Our poster will demonstrate the ease with which middle school students, who attended several workshops through our Google IgniteCS outreach program, were able to understand simple functional coding.
