Teacher demonstration shows young students learning coding with robots

During a classroom session featured by the district, the instructor who introduced himself as "Mr. Furman" engaged students in a hands-on coding exercise with robots. "I'm Mr. Furman, and seeing you all made me smile today," he told the class before instructing them on a sequence-based activity that let students push buttons to direct robot movement.

Mr. Furman framed coding in accessible terms: "Coding is just a fancy way of telling a robot what you would like it to do." He emphasized sequencing — telling the robot steps — and guided students as they translated button pushes into robot actions on a field. The demonstration illustrated how early elementary instruction uses tangible manipulatives to teach algorithmic thinking rather than abstract commands.

Students named things that made them smile as part of the warm-up and then practiced instructing robots, showing immediate, observable results from basic coding steps.