Perkins believes that students provided with thoughtful exposure to technology will better understand its power to deepen and expand thinking. With this in mind, our technology program rests on four main pillars: communication, creativity, coding, and engineering.
COMMUNICATION AND CREATIVITY
Through a variety of projects and assignments, students are exposed to the wide range of opportunities that technology offers for expanding and evolving the ways we communicate with each other and with the world. Perkins students graduate with an array of skills, experiences, and best practices, including:
Navigating both PC and Apple platforms
Stop-motion film and music video film-making
Safe online presence and responsible email usage
Book publishing, photojournalism and documentary film-making
Cartoon animation and comic strip creation
3D design and printing
Digital photography, music composition, and art
Keyboarding, iPad and word processing applications
Website building
CODING AND ENGINEERING
Through apps and tactile lessons with small programmable robots, students in all grades learn the linear thinking required for coding. They are cheered through the persistence of debugging their programs and given increasingly complicated challenges to code different types of robots to achieve certain outcomes, including using increased efficiency in their algorithms, conditional statements, functions, and looping.
Students are also involved in lessons where they must follow the steps of the engineering process to tackle a problem, design a solution, build, test, and revise it. They also learn to design and build their own robots, bridges, musical instruments, or inventions! As they move up through the grades, they incorporate electric circuitry and 3D printing into these projects.