Written by: Jeffries F. Epps, Staff Writer
At STEMERALD City’s Saturday Academy, we believe that learning should always be meaningful—and a little sweet. Today’s session was a perfect example of how we infuse creativity and curiosity into academic skills. One of our students, a young artist and passionate baker, took her love of baking to a whole new level through the power of coding.
Our learning objective was to strengthen her ability to code and decode, a skill critical to the reading and writing process in the ELA classroom. But instead of starting with text, we started with art. She sketched a delicious cake using colored pencils—topping it with swirls of icing, sprinkles, and all. This visual served as the foundation for our next step: bringing it to life with code.
Using P5.js, a creative coding environment in JavaScript, she recreated her cake digitally. But this wasn’t just about copying her drawing; it was about thinking mathematically and logically. Each part of the cupcake—circles, triangles, and rectangles—introduced her to basic 2D shapes and their geometric properties. Line by line, she applied problem-solving and critical thinking to translate her paper design into digital art.
Over 100 lines of code later, her cake emerged on the screen, pixel-perfect and sprinkled with pride. But here’s the real icing: I didn’t teach her coding—I used coding to teach.
For her, it was more than a programming exercise. It was storytelling through syntax, a creative challenge turned academic growth. And when she finally sat back and admired her work, she grinned and said, “That was a piece of cake.”
At STEMERALD City, that’s the kind of sweet success we love to celebrate.