In a dark, brick room with brown leather chairs, a group of children — kindergarten to second grade — build candy canes out of pipe cleaners and red and white plastic beads. On sheets of paper, they write their initials and translate the letters into binary code. For every 0, they drop a white bead, and every 1 gets a red.
The simple craft helps teach some of Bellingham Coding and Robotics Club’s youngest students the basics of binary code — the ones and zeros that create a computer’s language.
A student translates their initials to binary code before attaching corresponding red and white beads onto a pipe cleaner to make a candy cane. (Hailey Hoffman/Cascadia Daily News)
Behind them, other children work on computers, designing animations and Christmas tree ornaments to be produced on the club’s 3D printer. As the evening rolls on, the middle school-aged group arrives to build robotics for their competition. They stay late into the night to eat pizza and play Dungeons and Dragons.
At the Bellingham club, around 150 local children learn to code, build robots for competitions, create with 3D printers, fly drones and more each week. The club offers about a dozen after-school and weekend classes a week, club nights for pop-up activities and drop-in times for free exploration.
“I just found coding very interesting,” clubber Parker Edwards said. “It’s complex, and it’s like a whole different level of language.”
Parker Edwards, left, and Abby Reines work together on designing an ornament to be 3D printed. (Hailey Hoffman/Cascadia Daily News)
In October 2020, Bellingham resident Robin Smiley opened the club in its main Fairhaven location. The following summer, she saw about 400 more children pass through summer camps at Meridian High School and Burlington-Edison High School.
The success of the camps confirmed there was desire for another club location in Skagit County. Now, only two years since first opening, Smiley is expanding to Burlington in January. The new spot will offer many of the same classes for children from preschool to high school and run on a membership basis.
Smiley was born and raised in Bellingham but lived in California for much of her adult life. While in the Bay Area, her three children were active in one of the many coding clubs. When she returned to Bellingham with her family in tow, no coding clubs existed. So, with her extra free time during the COVID-19 pandemic, she started her own club and a new STEM community in Bellingham.
Robin Smiley works with students on building candy canes. (Hailey Hoffman/Cascadia Daily News)
Smiley attributes the quick success of the club to the hardworking staff and the enthusiasm of the children who take part in building a community in the science, technology, engineering and math field.
“What really hits home is when the moms pick up their kids from camps, and they say to me, ‘This is the first thing my kid has really loved and really wanted to be a part of,’” she said.
While coding may elicit images of children sitting alone, staring at a screen, the club encourages its participants to work together on projects, help one another solve problems and participate in STEM off-screen, in a team environment.
Smiley said resiliency is one of the biggest focuses in STEM work. She said the children, when working on projects and challenges, often hit roadblocks, but she and the other staff encourage them to try again. There’s no giving up and moving on.
“Some things are not going to work, and they’re going to break and that drone may crash and that password may not be right, but let’s have some resilience and keep at it,” she said.
Instructor Kellen Smith, left, and Nolan Overhauser work on attaching an arm to a robot to be used in a February competition. (Hailey Hoffman/Cascadia Daily News)
Instructor Kellen Smith said one of the best parts of the job is watching the kids’ reactions as they figure out a piece of complicated code, or finally get their robot to work how they hoped.
“There’s something cool about teaching and seeing when an idea finally clicks for them, and they’re like, ‘I got it!’” Smith said.
For more information, visit www.codingandroboticsclub.com.
