Educator Spotlight in CS: Kelly Odom

17 May, 2022

Kelly Odom is the CS teacher at Pennington Middle School in Lee County, VA. She understands how important unplugged CS activities are for learners, ensuring that both culturally relevant and personalized expression supports her student’s engagement. Take a look at how she seamlessly pivoted to an unplugged hardware basics lesson, during a recent network outage:

“Our division recently had a network outage that lasted for several days. Since we were unable to use our network and devices for the computer science rotation class, we spent several days creating paper laptops. Students got to color and personalize their paper laptops and learned about some of the parts inside a computer: CPU, RAM, ROM, Fan, USB port, and Hard Drive. We discussed what each of those parts did and assembled their laptops step by step. And a shoutout goes to Amazon Future Engineer for the stickers that each of my students got to decorate the outside of their paper laptops with- just like they do with their real ones!”

Kelly is the Impact Team Lead for Pennington MS and is a current participant in the Region VII CS Cohort, an ACSE grant-funded program offered through UVA Wise’s Center for Teaching Excellence. (Build Your Own Computer Activity, Source: Brittany Washburn, TeachersPayTeachers)