PDS is excited to have Nitya Narasimhan leading the industrious groups of lower and middle school Lego Robotics enthusiasts on Fridays after school this fall. Nitya’s own enthusiasm for the activity is clear from the moment you meet her. She has a strong vision for coding that she is eager to share with students.

A little about Nitya, her process of teaching Lego Robotics, and her discoveries and hopes for the course- in her own words:

By profession, I am a software engineering and researcher with a PhD in Computer Engineering. But when I moved to the Hudson Valley eight years ago, I discovered two passions: community and education. I founded the Google Developer Group (GDG) Hudson Valley to grow local awareness of emerging technologies and support software developer training around them. When my son turned five, we discovered the “Hour of Code” and I realized that anyone really could learn to code. I made it a mission to get more kids to try out an hour of code – at birthday parties, at daycare, even during a conference. It was amazing to see how empowered kids felt when they figured out how something worked, and then were able to create new things based on that concept. So we ran the Hour Of Code via GDG in 2015 and it was fantastic.

With Lego Robotics, the goal is to take this to the next level where they now can control not just digital characters on a screen, but actual physical objects in the real world. The truth is that we under-estimate our kids all the time. In the PDS Enrichment class, I have had first-hand experience with how creative (and funny, and joyous) kids can be when they are challenged to do something and given the room to make mistakes and the autonomy to experiment.