A cause to code in Wantagh

Wantagh High School’s front doors were open last Saturday, and about 150 students made their way through to improve their computer skills.

The third annual Tech Day focused on computer programming and was open to students in the district from fifth through 12th grades. Enrollment was up by about 50 percent from last year, and has tripled since its first year.

“That’s great for the district because that shows we have a great interest in computer science,” said Board of Education Trustee Peter Mountanos, who organized the program. Mountanos is a 2012 graduate of Wantagh High School and a data science major at New York University.

Students were divided up into nine classes based on their skill levels and interests. All of the volunteer instructors are recent Wantagh High School graduates either studying computer science in college or have an interest in the subject.

“It’s really a good thing to know, even if it’s not what I’m studying in school,” said Kaitlin Pfundstein, a 2014 Wantagh grad who is majoring in English at SUNY Geneseo. She attended Tech Day her senior year of high school, and has been an instructor the past two years.

“It’s a really good initiative,” she added. “It’s so relevant to everything that you do in your life.”

Richard Myers, a 2013 graduate, was teaching at Tech Day for the third year. He was leading an introductory course for fifth-graders, which included some basic movement of objects on the screen and game design. “I’m hoping they just enjoy it and want to come back and learn more, next year and on their own,” he said.

Myers, a physics and math major at Hofstra University, said he wished he had an opportunity to learn about computer programming when he was younger. Mountanos added that he hopes Wantagh can offer programming courses in the future, but noted the district has already made great strides with the creation of computer science clubs at the secondary level.

Tech Day also included a special presentation in the auditorium for the more advanced students. They were able to learn about various careers in computer science, game design and robotics, and also got to test out a heart rate monitor developed by one of the instructors, Dan Charytonowicz, and touch a hand made with a 3-D printer.

Sixth-grader Justin Corabi, who came to Tech Day for the first time and is a member of the middle school’s Computer Science club, said he can envision a career in computer programming. He has already experimented with website design and was at school on Saturday to advance his coding skills.

Penny Curry, Wantagh’s director of instructional technology, said Tech Day provides students with a hands-on learning opportunity with people who are very knowledgeable. She noted that the district has been growing its collection of technological resources in recent years, and participants last Saturday got to use many of those computers, including the Google Chrome Books.

The hope, she said, is that students who attended Tech Day will share what they learned with their Wantagh classmates. “To see the spark in these kids at such a young age is just proof of where their generation is,” Curry said. “It’s exciting and it’s relevant.”

Mountanos explained that it is important for children to begin learning these skills at a young age because it will open more doors for them in the future. He said he was pleased that close to three-quarters of the students who came to Tech Day were from the elementary and middle schools. “If they start at this age,” he said, “their opportunities are limitless.”