Jeff Yearout brings conceptual thinking into his classroom at Derby High School, Derby Unified School District 260, helping students think beyond the surface. 

Yearout has taught computer science, web design and computer graphics at Derby High School since 2016. He is the only computer science teacher at the school. 

“It’s harder, of course, if I’m taking on something new that I haven’t done before and have no built curriculum to look from,” he said. “But I’m constantly recrafting things I’ve done before to adjust it and make it better for students.” 

Students will easily mimic, Yearout said, but getting them to read what they’re learning and think about how it’s actually working and what it’s doing is a little bit of a challenge.  

Inspired by a class he took at Kansas State University recently, he’s trying to deepen students’ understanding of what they’re doing, rather than just copying what he teaches. 

He has used MIT App Inventor, an online program, for the past nine years and has seen success with it. It allows students to use block-based coding that will run on mobile devices, and uses a visual drag-and-drop interface. By connecting various blocks, developers can write programs without knowing a programming language. 

“It’s very easy to get started in, but it has a lot of capabilities,” Yearout said. “If students get into the coding, they can see the result right away on a device, which is certainly something that is very enticing for students.” 

A goal of using the MIT App Inventor for Yearout is to get students to start creating on their own instead of mimicking things in a lesson. He said he typically sees success in this each semester with students telling him they went home and created their own product. 

“There’s always going to be some students who realize this isn’t for them and I tell them that’s ok,” he said. “That’s kind of the purpose of this in high school is to figure out what they like and don’t like. I will always typically have one or two students each semester who will say they didn’t think they had any interest in this and found they like it. It’s always interesting to see.” 

Yearout said you don’t have to be a computer science teacher to get computational thinking into the classroom. 

“A lot of teachers are actually already doing computational thinking. They just may not call it that,” he said. “It’s a way to get better at logical thinking and critical thinking, all those skills that we want everybody to have. The goal isn’t to make everybody a programmer, the goal is to make everybody a better thinker.” 

Next semester, Liberal High School, Liberal USD 480, will offer a new programming class to students. 

This will be the first time Cole Ely, a business and computers teacher at Liberal High School, will teach a dedicated programming class. However, this won’t be the first time he has incorporated programming into his lessons. 

Having played Dungeons and Dragons in high school, he used that experience of programming to help his students. 

“When I started teaching programming, it was just natural,” he said. “All of my examples of programs were game-oriented, so it was easy to fall into game design.” 

Ely said he would like to get more students in the programming class who are interested in math. 

"Teaching programming is pretty mathematical,” he said. “Even in the early days, I would learn a new formula and then put it in the computer. Anybody who teaches programming, you teach a lot of math. A lot of logic goes into it.” 

Ely said even if you’re not a computer science major, you’re going to be using a computer. 

“The better you are at using a computer, the more successful you’re going to be and the more likely you are to move up,” he said. 

Computer Science Education Week is celebrated Dec. 9-15, 2024.