Coding Before Kindergarten: State Education Leaders Celebrate STEM Week at Horizons
State leaders celebrated the start of Massachusetts’ 2026 STEM Week at our Edgerley Family Horizons Center in Roxbury, and our preschoolers ran the show. Secretary of Education Dr. Stephen Zrike Jr. and Early Education and Care Commissioner Amy Kershaw visited our STEAM lab. They were joined by State Representative Ken Gordon, House chair of the Joint Committee on Education. This year’s theme is “STEM Starts Now,” and our four- and five-year-olds showed them what that looks like.
Using the story Everybody in the Red Brick Building by Anne Wynter, the kids coded KIBO robots with wooden blocks as part of Horizons’ innovative screen-free curriculum. During a demonstration led by Horizons STEM Director Mike Adams and Abby Bergman of Boston College’s DevTech Research Group, each child arranged a row of blocks into a program, uploaded it to KIBO, and ran it to set their robot in motion. Riding on top was a story puppet each child made, traveling through a neighborhood from the book they’d been reading in their literacy lessons.
"Our four-year-old engineers are becoming creative and persistent problem-solvers. When a robot heads the wrong way, most of them don't give up. They want to know why, and they work at creating, testing, and improving a solution until the robot does what they want it to,"
The lesson is just one part of a 36-week curriculum at Horizons built around literacy and storytelling. It has three modules and pairs age-appropriate technology with teacher training. Over the year, students will build making, engineering, coding, and computational thinking skills and learn to tell stories that are personally meaningful, using a variety of robotics platforms.
"Literacy is woven throughout this work as children use stories, sounds, and movement to build sequencing and coding skills. Our integrated curriculum and teacher training make STEM part of everyday learning, grounded in Horizons' trauma-informed approach,"
The children in our classrooms are growing up without a stable home. Here they get to build things and try again when they don’t work. On Monday, they got to show the state’s education leaders what they can do.
""Digital equity has to start early for every child. Access and opportunity should not be reserved for those who can afford them. Our children deserve to be part of the future workforce and to have the same head start as any child, regardless of their housing situation. Every child deserves the chance to see themselves as a scientist, an engineer, and a creator. For the young children we serve who are experiencing homelessness, that chance starts here.”
Thanks to Secretary Zrike, Commissioner Kershaw, Rep. Gordon, and the DevTech team for coming to see us.
Learn more about Horizons and our STEM curriculum at horizonschildren.org.
