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The St. Pius School robotics class having some fun with pastor Father Tom Martin. Back row from left: Joey Abedrabbo, seventh grade, Rob Decottignies, coach; Brandon Manca, sixth grade; Father Tom Martin. Front from left: Giovanni Decottignies, sixth; Amy Welte, coach/program coordinator; Rebecca Welte, sixth; Akshara Panhcumarthi, sixth; Nick Contreras, sixth. Not pictured: Hudson Taylor, seventh. (Photo by Debra Greenblat/Catholic San Francisco)
January 13, 2020
Lidia Wasowicz
Responding to the needs of the swiftly shifting times, Catholic schools are introducing innovative programs to update and upgrade their trademark of excellence in growing and developing the whole person.
At St. Pius in Redwood City, youngsters are gaining hands-on experience in science, technology, engineering and math by creating, constructing, controlling, correcting and competing with robots.
In 2016-2017, second graders at All Souls in South San Francisco began incorporating programming language into classroom conversations and collaborations. Their rapid development of fluency in software syntax encouraged expansion to third grade and middle school of age-appropriate exposure to technologies and techniques – from Scratch to Makerspace – considered essential to 21st-century literacy.
Boasting that “in a world of change, Mercy women take the lead,” the all-girl San Francisco high school has carved out four career-cinching curricular tracks catering to students’ personal passions and professional proclivities. Freshmen can select Women in Performing Arts, Women in Technology, Women in the Arts or Women in Science and Healthcare.
“Each ‘women in’ pathway provides a unique, focused curriculum where our students can access guest lectures, internships and one-to-one mentorship programs with Bay Area professionals,” said communications coordinator Theresa Poon.
“For the Mercy student who chooses a special program, the real world is her classroom where she is able to earn credits to graduate with honors and more importantly gain a fuller understanding of how to make her dreams a reality.”
Opting for the one-of-a-kind offerings, senior Nyla Moore, Amelie Justo, Class of 2021, and recent graduate Tara Kent, now a student at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, took sizable steps toward turning their dreams into reality.
Three years in WIPA have cemented Nyla’s lifelong interest in the field.
“I have not only gotten better at performing, but I now have the passion to write and direct plays and musicals,” said the veteran of musical theater since childhood.
“My dream would be to perform for a professional company that does musical theater or to teach musical theater.”
Her WIPA-enriched portfolio provides a promising start.
She has received advice from actors working locally and touring from abroad, scripted plays with internationally known writer Ron Jones, honed voice skills and trained for auditions at the Pacific Singers and Actors Workshop, developed a network of notables and spent summers at the prestigious New York University Tisch School of the Arts and Mountainview Academy of Theatre Arts in London.
Amelie has had an equally excellent experience since entering Mercy and WiTECH in 2017.
“I mainly thought we were going to be doing things like coding and working with the 3D printer, which is also cool, but I really got to explore my interest in photography by learning how to take pictures with professional cameras and how to edit them on software called Lightroom,” she said.
As an added bonus, she discovered the value of the classwork extends to plans close to her heart.
“I want to work with organizations that help with immigration, domestic violence and troubled youth,” said Amelie, whose WiTECH courses taught her the usefulness of social media in promoting such causes. “You would think that technology doesn’t really associate with what I want to do in the future, but it does!”
Likewise, Tara’s WITA studies will serve her for life.
Boosting her confidence and connections, they prompted the budding photographer to join the San Francisco Women Artists’ Gallery, founded in 1887, and provided a broad platform for exhibiting her art.
“I’m still not entirely set on what I want to do, but I’m playing around with the idea of going into the State Department, photojournalism, museum curations,” the college freshman said.
“No matter where I end up, I’m going to be taking my camera, (and) the values I learned and the people I met will stick with me for a lifetime, regardless of whether or not I go professional.”
The program aims to help determine a student’s fit with her specialized studies and to impart universally applicable wisdom, said WISH director Karina Mathisen.
Even if at the end of four years, a graduate decides against majoring in science and health care in college, “a good science foundation is still critical for any field of study, be it law, politics, journalism,” she said.
Aiming for lasting life lessons, All Souls principal Vincent Riener and his team worked out a progressive plan to prep for the future.
Started as a pilot project in grade two and now incorporated through grade eight, it engages students in increasingly complex tasks that take the mystery out of science, technology, engineering, art and math.
These range from building simple machines to coding in Scratch – a child-centered, block-based programming language used to devise and share online stories, games, music, animation – to developing websites with Java to tinkering in a Makerspace, a spot designated for collaborative creativity.
“It has always been part of our school philosophy to educate the whole child, and we recognize that each child is different and will learn in different ways,” Riener said.
“The school maintains important and meaningful traditions while continually updating programs and providing new and exciting technologies.”
Exciting enough for Alyssa Jurado and Emily Cierra to entertain as a career.
Coding, web design and online program development aimed Alyssa in a new direction.
“I have learned how to use my imagination and creativity … to be more independent and (to) troubleshoot my way out of many situations,” said the seventh grader who plans to pursue studies in the sciences.
Her father praised the school for modernizing its curriculum.
“The new programs at All Souls are very important to me as a parent as they help our children gain the skills … I deem necessary to be an interesting person, employee, friend,” he said.
For Emily, in her last year at All Souls, Makerspace made all the difference.
“While participating in this program, I realized that I really enjoyed robotics and (that) I want to eventually become a robotic engineer,” she revealed.
Some of the 16 students on four St. Pius robotics teams, debuted a year ago, came to their own realizations.
For Hudson Taylor, 12, it was “that not everything works in the beginning, that it takes work and that you don’t always have to win – playing is fun too.”
For Rebecca Welte, a sixth grader whose malfunction-prone robot Bessie broke down a nail-biting 30 minutes before the first tournament, it was the importance of teamwork.
“We always had to work together, and if people were having feelings – bad feelings – about someone else, they always worked it out,” she said.
Anticipating such a positive end game, now retired principal Rita Carroll supported the “creative outlet for learning” from the start.
“Students learn to think differently and work collaboratively,” she said.
Favoring such learning for her two sons at St. Pius, Carla Taylor voted for the parent-instigated initiative.
“Robotics and coding programs should be part of their daily routines,” she said. “It is the future.”
Coordinator and coach Amy Welte, who conceived and created the after-school activity, sees another, less visible benefit.
“(Nonathletes) may be reluctant to go out for a team sport like volleyball or basketball but enjoy the opportunity to work on a robot,” Welte said.
The work – which breeds familiarity with gears, levers, controllers, mechanical linkages and other engineering fundamentals – revolves around “raising” Lego-based robots with a central processing unit or “brain” that commands them to proceed, retreat, turn, lift, twist, stack, hang, push or pull to score in a game. Those with the most points advance through local, state, national and world competitions.
“It was fun to see our St. Pius students leverage what they saw from other teams and create their own design and improve their score,” said Welte’s co-coach Robert Decottignies. “This program is important because in a real world corporate-engineering environment, it is very similar.”
The main drawbacks, parents and principals said, include time required of coaches and other volunteers and money needed for covering equipment purchases or rentals and entry fees. In addition, practices and competitions may interfere with sporting events.
Small price to pay for the ultimate payoff, Welte said.
“Catholic schools have long offered a high-quality, faith-centered avenue for schooling our children, but the reality is that parents have many choices when it comes to education,” she noted. “Adding enrichment programs like robotics that enhance the learning experience for children makes Catholic schools an even more compelling choice.”