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American Fork Junior High spotlights coding, robotics and shop skills during Career and Technical Education Month
Summary
Teachers and a student at American Fork Junior High described the school’s Career and Technical Education offerings, which include required seventh-grade career awareness, creative coding in grades seven and eight, and specialized ninth-grade engineering, robotics and shop classes.
This month, American Fork Junior High teachers and students highlighted Career and Technical Education offerings designed to build technical and hands-on skills that feed into high school pathways and potential careers. Ben Cummings, a teacher at American Fork Junior High, and Thomas Walsh, career and technical education teacher at the school, described required and elective courses for seventh through ninth graders. Lois Jones, a seventh-grade student, said she is enrolled in career-and-college-awareness and coding classes.
The program aims to introduce broad career areas in seventh grade and let students specialize by ninth grade. "In seventh grade, they have a required class, college and career awareness," Walsh said. "We also have creative coding in seventh and eighth grade, which really leads into our ninth-grade classes such as web development, exploring computer science and robotics." Cummings said ninth-graders take engineering and robotics courses that include hands-on metal and wood shop work.
Teachers said the junior-high courses are intended to reinforce academic subjects and to give students practical experience. "As soon as they understand just the basics of programming structures like loops and variables, then really it opens their ability to program in any language," Cummings said. Walsh noted shop and manufacturing projects, such as penny boards and robotics builds, that let students apply math and science concepts in the shop and lab.
Students described frequent take-home or at-home projects. "There's, hey, look what I 3D printed, look what I modeled," Cummings said, describing daily student demonstrations of at-home learning applied from class. Lois Jones, a seventh grader at American Fork Junior High, said she has completed multiple sections of the college-and-career-awareness curriculum and is also in a coding class. "I've liked all of it," she said.
Teachers and the student emphasized that the junior-high classes are pathways into high school technical programs. "Our hope is to continue on those pathways into high school," Walsh said. The speakers did not specify program funding sources or enrollment limits.
