At the end of a long hallway at Coppell High School, there’s some serious work going on.   “So we are trying to put the rubber band inside a hole, inside a really tiny hole,” said student Laila Hunter. “It mimics the industrial robots that you would see in the industrial factories like Amazon, TI, the automakers,” added Nick Brown, teacher. Their goals in life aren’t to build robots but to be the engineers who design and program them.  “For a person to know both the building side and the coding side of how things work they can code it much more perfectly,” said Srithika Mahendran, a student. The lesson here is simple: teach coding, show its uses in the real world, and hope it sparks students who love math and science to think.  Schools across North Texas have been teaching coding and STEM to kids since they were in first grade.  The building blocks placed back then have really taken shape right here.  “So when they leave that class, it’s not just, Oh, I got the A but I’ve got this resource now that will allow me to maybe get my foot in the door at Amazon, or get my foot in the door at TI,” added Brown. For years, we’ve heard girls haven’t pursued careers in STEM as often as guys, but not what we see here.  “I’m so used to there being a lot of girls,” said Mahitha Kodali.  While many of these ladies admit they stumbled into this, they’re so glad they did.    “It was just like my mom telling me, like, ‘This might be something you like’ and I went to class and was like, I was just blown away,” said Hunter.