PROGRAMMING POWER

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May 3, 2022

For information on enrollment and registration at Notre Dame, an independent, Catholic, International Baccalaureate school, please visit the admissions section of our website here.

Contingent from Notre Dame middle and upper schools gets the lowdown on high technology used for programming cars, games and other industrial and consumer products.

GHI Electronics, LLC, in Madison Heights, Mich., is a world leader in providing embedded hardware-software core modules to help companies in reducing cost, complexity, and time to market. The company also understands the importance of a quality education, which is where Notre Dame Preparatory School and Marist Academy comes in.

The company says it knows firsthand about the increased opportunity its engineers and technicians were afforded because of their own education.

"We are passionate about providing a glimpse of the same educational opportunities to students so they are most likely to find a fulfilling career they are passionate about," it notes on its website. "As part of this pursuit, we give frequent tours of our facility and created the BrainPad to provide an intuitive STEM/STEAM learning experience for students of all ages."

On April 29, nearly 30 students from Notre Dame's middle and upper schools got a chance to experience that learning at GHI as Eden Konja, Notre Dame's director of information and academic technology, and Technology Integration Specialist Melissa York transported the students for about a half day of rather intense demonstrations and hands-on activities.

York said basically the reason for the trip was for students to gain more experience with coding and other STEM activities. 

But it ended up as much more.

"It was a really cool experience for the students," she said. "We opened the field trip up to anyone who was interested in attending from the middle and upper schools, and it may be just a coincidence, but most of the students who attended also are in our robotics program."

For the first activity of the morning, the Notre Dame students created a game with code using the following site makecode.brainpad.com. They then applied what they coded to the BrainPad, a special coding platform designed to help students understand the intricacies of computing hardware and software. The students also were able to play the games they designed on the BrainPad. 

"After that, the kids worked with coding for circuits and light sensors and, finally, students coded a real car and actually made it move," York said. "At the end of the field trip, the company took us through their warehouse and walked us through the entire process of how their microchips are built and made."

All in all, it was another fascinating field trip for the kids, said Konja, who discovered BrainPad and GHI Electronics at a previous Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning, or MACUL, conference. 

"It's really refreshing to be able to take advantage of companies in our area such as GHI, which as part of their own mission, regularly volunteers both time and materials to organizations and schools like ours," he said.

For information on enrollment and registration at Notre Dame, an independent, Catholic, International Baccalaureate school, please visit the admissions section of our website here.

Comments or questions? mkelly@ndpma.org

Follow Notre Dame on Twitter at @NDPMA.

About Notre Dame Preparatory School and Marist Academy
Notre Dame Preparatory School and Marist Academy is a private, Catholic, independent, coeducational day school located in Oakland County. Notre Dame Preparatory School enrolls students in grades nine through twelve and has been named one of the nation's best 50 Catholic high schools (Acton Institute) four times since 2005. Notre Dame's middle and lower schools enroll students in pre-kindergarten through grade eight. All three schools are International Baccalaureate "World Schools." NDPMA is conducted by the Marist Fathers and Brothers and is accredited by the Independent Schools Association of the Central States and the National Association of Independent Schools. For more on Notre Dame Preparatory School and Marist Academy, visit the school’s home page at www.ndpma.org.