When Scott Bartholomew’s daughter asked him five years ago why he wasn’t working with her third-grade class, it wasn’t a typical “Dad, come to my school” question.
Bartholomew, an associate professor in the BYU Department of Technology and Engineering Studies, trains teachers worldwide in integrating STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) subjects and is a passionate advocate on the subject. But he had no idea how far his daughter’s question would take him.
“I told her that I normally train middle and high school teachers and haven’t done a lot with elementary teachers but that I could work with her class,” said Bartholomew. And he did, making plans to sit down and talk with a teacher at Foothills Elementary in Nebo School District in Utah.
“I learned pretty quickly that the elementary school curriculum is packed,” he said. “It is so full. I had all these ideas of what I wanted to do for her class, such as building maglev trains or rockets or other things, but my daughter’s teacher said the curriculum was just so packed that there wasn’t time for much more.”
Pivoting, but still wanting to help, Bartholomew asked what the class was struggling with. The teacher responded that they were struggling with literacy—specifically with parts of a story such as plot, theme, character, and climax. That doesn’t seem very STEM-aligned at first glance, but after thinking it over, Bartholomew decided to try bridging literacy and engineering design with computational thinking and coding.
The idea was simple: students would take a scene from their favorite story, color it, and then add electronics—motors, lights, sensors—to it in such a way that the picture would become a prop to tell the story. Bartholomew would bring computational thinking, coding, and engineering design to the table, and the students would do the project within their curriculum’s larger literacy unit.
“The first year wasn’t a total bust, but it didn’t go great,” Bartholomew said. “I’d never worked with third graders before, and I made a lot of assumptions about what they would and wouldn’t know.”
But he persisted. The following year, Bartholomew received a BYU-mentored research grant, hired several undergraduate students, and offered a new iteration of his STEM integration project in the larger literacy units of not only his daughter’s fourth-grade class but all the fourth-grade classes in the school.
“We still made some mistakes, but we got better and learned a lot,” Bartholomew said. “The outcome of that year was a 10-week unit in which we taught the students about literacy, engineering, design, basic coding, and basic electronics.”
The 10-week unit starts with students spending several weeks learning the parts of a story and then creating a story card or digital storyboard. It ends with students participating in various engineering design challenges—such as building a step counter or designing an automatic plant-watering device.
“Once the students are in the challenges, we focus less on the parts of the story and more on the coding,” said Tamara Grimes, a student in the BYU Department of Technology and Engineering Studies and a student teacher with Bartholomew. Grimes added, however, that code requires a different kind of reading, so helping students learn to read through code is like helping them be literate in another language. “Once you teach them to be code literate and they know what the code actually means, then a world of possibilities opens up for them, and then they can create their own new things.”
Once the project began to see success, the McKay School approached Bartholomew to continue the project on an even wider scale. He was invited to apply for a Research-Practice Partnership Grant to offer his unit to schools involved in the BYU–Public School Partnership—meaning that the unit would be taught across five school districts.
Bartholomew got the grant and got to work. The project is now in its fifth year, and Bartholomew estimates that the curriculum has been taught to close to 1,000 fourth-grade students and has seen incredible success in helping students in both engineering design and literacy.
“We’ve collected a lot of really good data from this project,” Bartholomew said. “There are some papers in the works, and we’ve shown statistically significant positive gains for students who have done the project, which is really encouraging.”
But none of the work that he’s done would be possible without his team of undergraduate students.
“I have several undergraduate students who all go and teach the curriculum in elementary classes across the valley,” he explained. “They each teach in up to four classes for an hour each week, which has been great because they’re getting real-life teaching experience.”
Student teacher Sam Everitt has loved helping kids develop a love of coding and engineering.
“When you first introduce these kids to coding, most of them typically respond by saying coding is something that they will either never be able to do or never want to do,” Everitt said. “However, after even just a couple of weeks, the students are already responding with ‘Yes, I love coding!’ or ‘You better be coming back next week because I love this so much.’”
Seeing this change has been very fulfilling for Everitt. He said: “I am so honored to be a part of their learning process. It’s so amazing to see a spark light up in their eyes when they realize they can do something they thought they couldn’t.”
Grimes agreed and said that the unit helps all students gain enthusiasm for STEM subjects. “Sometimes when I walk into a classroom for the first time, I can see that some kids in the class, usually girls, get the idea that coding is a boy thing or something just for if you like video games,” she said. “But by the end it’s fun to see how even among the girls everyone is excited about coding.”
Emily Blaisdell, a teacher at Mapleton Elementary, noticed a similar trend among her students during the unit.
“My favorite thing about this project is watching students’ confidence in their own problem-solving abilities increase and seeing how empowered they become—especially female students and students who struggle academically,” Blaisdell said. “I noticed that students who excelled academically were more quickly and easily discouraged, often giving up prematurely in comparison to their peers. It was wonderful for my students who tend to struggle academically to have the chance to be the leader, helper, and teacher for students who were not used to being in that kind of position in which they needed assistance and encouragement from peers.”
“These kids sometimes cry when they’re doing the projects,” said Krissy Johnson, a teacher at Foothills Elementary. “There’s often a lot of frustration involved, but in the end the projects help them in a lot of ways. It makes them problem-solve, which gives them grit—which is something many kids are lacking right now. And when they get more grit, it helps them change their mindset, which directly affects their ability as a student.”
Both teachers praised the program, saying the curriculum helps students not only pick up skills in coding and story making but also in perseverance, problem-solving, resilience, and creativity.
Bartholomew said he and his students are now focused on making the curriculum work long-term. “In the past we’ve shown up, we teach, and the teachers observe, which isn’t super sustainable,” he said. “This year we’re trying to shift the focus so that we show up and the teachers team-teach with us. We’re hoping to continue to transition, and when our funding inevitably runs out, the teachers can do it completely on their own without our help.”
As long as they can, Bartholomew and his team will continue to educate and nurture the full potential in the students involved in the Digital Storytelling Project.
