Sarah Doran ’22 Presents at New Hampshire Educators’ Conference

Sarah Doran ’22, an Elementary Education major, recently presented at TEACHAPALOOZA, an Educator Rising Conference for students in teacher preparation programs throughout New Hampshire. For her presentation titled “Shaping the Future With Coding-Why is it Meaningful?” Doran discussed and demonstrated robotic tools that can be used to teach coding skills to young students.

Doran works at Curry’s Education Resource Center, which has a collection of “Dot, Dash, and Cue” robots and iPads to support coding using the Wonder App. For her presentation, Doran emphasized how coding is interdisciplinary.

“For teachers, it promotes problem solving through active learning,” said Doran. “For students, it helps them learn how to communicate, collaborate, and to think creatively and critically.”

Doran, who is also a mathematics minor, said she became interested in coding this past year when she participated in a Science Curriculum class and an Engineering and Robotics class at Curry. She used content from those courses to create and deliver a professional development workshop to her Senior Capstone classmates. From this work, she redeveloped the workshop for the educators’ conference.

Curry College Education Professor and Director of DESE Credentialing Joanne Seltzer said Doran’s conference sessions received many accolades by the student participants and their faculty mentors.