For more than two decades, Nick Pesola has been a teacher at Marble Hill School for International Studies, a public high school in the Bronx. In that time, he has taught everything from chemistry to AP Calculus. But perhaps his most transformative work began seven years ago, when a sabbatical year in Philadelphia shifted the direction of both his career and his school’s future.
During that year, Pesola joined Penn GSE’s Experiences in Applied Computational Thinking (EXACT) program, a professional development initiative led by Betty Chandy and designed to help educators integrate computational thinking and emerging technologies into their classrooms. At the time, he had already been teaching for 14 years but felt that Marble Hill was missing something essential. “Our school was strong in the humanities and foreign languages,” he said. “But we were neglecting the whole 21st-century skill set of technology. I wanted to change that.”