“We can figure it out”: How one Minnesota teacher uses Experience CS to set the tone for her whole year

Walk into Allison Knoph’s fifth grade classroom in Edina, Minnesota in October and the creative writing station will be the loudest place in the room.

That is by design. “I use it at my creative writing station,” she says of Experience CS, which she has run each fall for the past couple of years. Kids use the station computers to be creative as they work on their programming projects, building characters and testing jokes they have written. Some laugh hard enough that a visitor might wonder if anyone is working.

“Giggling,” Allison says, “is a good problem to have.”

Placement matters

Experience CS is a standards-aligned computer science curriculum for grades 3 to 8 (ages 8 to 14) that integrates computing into core subjects like math, science, and art. Allison has completed two units with her students, The me project, designed for ages 9 to 10, and Ecosystems, designed for ages 12 to 13.

Of the two units, the storywriting-themed The me project was the stronger fit. It mapped cleanly onto language arts work her students were already doing. Students hit the signposts the unit lays out, but what they did inside that structure was theirs. One wrote the minimum and moved on. Another built a multi-scene story with custom sound effects, spending three weeks developing their project and making improvements.

The Ecosystems unit was more challenging for her students, and the students who finished “were the ones who were kind of the more gung-ho ones that were really into it.” She is not dismissing it, but she is clear that placement matters.

Helping each other

Allison highlighted that some of the students who were thriving in the Experience CS lessons were students who were experiencing difficulties in other areas of the curriculum. “The kids who don’t normally shine often do here,” she says. Describing one experience from her classroom, she shared that a student who had difficulties with reading quickly understood how a program should be sequenced. Within a week, classmates were walking to that desk for help. The peer support model is not something she engineers. It builds itself.

Running the lessons in October sets a tone she draws on all year. Something breaks, a student gets stuck, and the answer in her room becomes “We can figure it out.” That carries into math, into writing, into everything after.

Why now

Allison is not arguing that every student will grow up to write code. Her argument is that computational thinking transfers, and that it looks a lot like the writing instruction she is already doing: syntax, structure, sequence. Debugging a story and debugging a program are closer cousins than most people think.

In the age of AI, computational thinking and coding skills are especially important. Access to AI tools makes it easier for more people to generate code. Fewer people can read it, judge whether it is any good, and change it. Allison saw this on her son’s robotics team: the students who understood their code could adapt it when the robot did something unexpected. The ones who had generated code and dropped it in could not. Same tools, different outcomes, and the difference was comprehension.

The context in Minnesota

Minnesota ranks near the bottom nationally for computer science access. In the most recent state-by-state accounting, 34 percent of its public high schools offered a foundational CS course, against a national average of 60 percent.

As a fifth grade teacher, Allison believes that if students may not have opportunities to learn CS in high school, the introduction has to happen earlier, in a classroom not labeled computer science.

She is candid that the barrier for elementary teachers is not interest. It is time, cost, and the fear of being asked a question they cannot answer. She sums up the Experience CS offering to her colleagues in a few words: free, little direct instruction, fits standards she is already teaching, and the kids like it enough to be loud about it.

“We can figure it out” is a good thing for a teacher to say out loud. It is a better thing for a room of ten-year-olds to start saying back.

Find out more about introducing Experience CS in your classroom: head to experience-cs.org today.

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