Crash Creative's Brandon Curtis believes learning what real-life careers are like in coding and computing is hugely important for Ridgeland High School's students. "Our main goal with partnering with Walker [County Schools] is to show the students they can finish high school, go to college if they wanted and have the opportunity to do something in tech world," he said.There are days at Ridgeland High School when Tim Warren learns just as much as the students he's teaching.
"Students will come in with questions that I have to look up," Warren said. "It's been incredible how quickly some of them are taking to the material."
Warren is a math teacher at Ridgeland, but through a new partnership with Crash Creative, a web design agency out of Chattanooga, he's been instructing students in the ways of computer science. The partnership, which started last semester, is part of Ridgeland's STEM Academy, a program designed to introduce students to what careers in technology and engineering will look like after they've graduated.
"We want to teach these kids what's going to be useful out of high school and college in the workforce," said Brandon Curtis, a Crash Creative representative who's working closely with Ridgeland.
The partnership is planned to last for two years.
Much of the fall semester's curriculum was centered around the impact technology and social media have on students' lives, and creating a professional resume and online presence that future employers would find appealing.
This semester, students in Warren's classes will work on creating a website for the STEM Academy at Ridgeland.
Right now, Warren is introducing the concepts of HTML to his students to lay the groundwork for more advanced coding as the program progresses. One thing that's impressed the students is the similarities in logic and reasoning that go into algebra and into writing code.
This, he said, gives the students a solid idea of how their math studies could be applied once they are out of school.
"When you're creating a line of code, it's almost like creating an equation," said Warren. "You have to make something that works every single time. Those mindsets pair together very well."
While Warren admitted not every student might have their eye on a career in computer science once they graduate, he believes it's important for them to have a basic understanding of what goes into computing and its wider relevance.
For those who do have an interest, though, Warren said he's seen a drastic change in how some have learned to love the math he teaches.
"The students feel like they have more fun with it," he said.
Ridgeland is a one-to-one school, meaning there's a tablet or computer for every student, but implementing these tools into daily lessons isn't always an easy task, according to Mike Afdahl, the science and technology coordinator for Walker County Schools. Crash Creative's partnership with Ridgeland extends past the students. Curtis and his associates have given seminars to the teachers at Ridgeland to explain how they can better integrate technology into the classrooms.
"Crash Creative helped us identify digital and technological literacy, where our role as teachers were and where we can find room in our curriculum for it," Afdahl said. "We don't want to make it a separate entity."
Some of what Crash Creative has tried to encourage the teachers to do is not just use the technology as a method of delivering information, but for students to use it to create or navigate more independently while in and out of class.
The more the teachers can engage students with the technology beyond simple presentations, the better, he explained.
"Walker [County Schools] wanted to get our spin on what technology is like from a real world perspective," Curtis said. "That's one of the most beneficial things of the partnership: giving kids real world examples of what tech looks like outside of a textbook."