[see update below.] It was the monthly "engineering week" when I visited the A.J. Whittenberg Elementary School of Engineering in Greenville, South Carolina, in January. Volunteers from one of the several local big-name companies in town were teaching special lessons. This week, employees from General Electric, some in purple t-shirts, were teaching about hydro, wind, and solar power sources.

One volunteer was boiling water in a glass beaker, which produced steam, which drove a pinwheel to spin. Another was demonstrating the evolution of light bulbs, measuring the amount of heat the bulbs produced, and engaging fourth graders in a discussion of what it meant to a bulb that much of its energy was spent on producing heat instead of light.

Whittenberg is -- no kidding -- an elementary school of engineering. The mascot of the school (below) is a robot, and the kids are not the “cougars” or the “tigers” but the “engineers.” Academically, the school presents lots of special projects around engineering and also folds engineering skills into traditional academic subjects.

Whittenberg is a public school that sits smack in the middle of an area that Lynn Mann, the school’s director of programs, described to me as a highly distressed area of Greenville, with high poverty, unemployment, crime, and single parent households.

The school, pre-K through grade 5, opened in 2010, and it is graduating the first class this year. It shares property with The Salvation Army Ray and Joan Kroc Corps Community Center, built concurrently. Kids go to the Kroc Center for lessons in swimming, golf, rock climbing, tennis, soccer, and on and on. The Kroc Center holds some adult classes in the computer labs at the school.  I reached the school on foot, a 10-minute walk from our hotel, which was just off Greenville’s newly-revitalized and charming Main Street, via the runner-walker-biker heaven that is the Swamp Rabbit Trail. The 17.5 mile trail, completed in 2010, runs mostly along an old railroad bed from Greenville to nearby Travelers Rest, S.C., so named as a former stopping point on the 19th century stagecoach line.

The school also sits smack in the middle of the engineering mecca that Greenville has become. GE, Michelin,  and BMW, which have strong manufacturing and research presence in the area, engage in so many ways with the town, including this elementary school. In fact the list of partners for the school numbers more than 2 dozen, including Fluor, Hubbell Lighting, Duke Energy, Furman and Clemson, among others, making it a classic example of the public-private ventures we saw throughout Greenville.

After a 40-year hiatus when not a single new public school was built in Greenville, it didn’t take long for Whittenberg to take off.* Ms. Mann told me that in first year, few people had gotten wind of the school, and they had to hire high school kids to canvass the neighborhood, introducing the school to parents and encouraging them to enroll their youngsters. (Families who live within a 1.5 mile radius of the school can enroll as its neighborhood school; others must apply. Today, about 1/3 of the 400+ students are from the neighborhood; 2/3 are from other parts of Greenville.)

By the second year, word was out, and parents camped out in front of the school for a week before registration for the first-come-first-served spots. It was so popular that the local Lowe’s home store offered discounts to parents for their camping supplies.  Then it spun so out of control that the school switched to a lottery system for the out-of-neighborhood spots. Now, Ms. Mann told me, Greenville realtors advertise the in-town location as an advantage when listing houses in the Whittenberg district.

Here are some of the sights and insights from my morning at the school:

Unexpected sights: The walls of the fourth and fifth grade corridor are bare, except for digital screens. In fact, almost everything in the fourth and fifth grade is digital. It makes for a paperless environment, where all the schoolwork is done on tablets, students enter their work into folders, teachers use a stylus to comment on work, and parents are encouraged to open the folders and monitor the entirety of their children’s work.

How do the students handle this system? They are masters. They start keyboarding in kindergarten, with unplugged keyboards. By second grade they have each been issued an iPad. And they learn Power Point, not my favorite application but one certainly encouraged by the engineering community. The school does teach to print out block letters, and the students are graded on penmanship throughout their years. However – and this news comes as a Praise-the-Lord moment for me, a mother of boys – cursive writing is not taught! How much struggle, I reflected, our boys could have avoided without the hours they spent on cursive in elementary school.

Ms. Mann reported that even she had a bit of a hard time believing in the absence of cursive. When considering the move away from cursive, the consultants challenged her to come up with examples of when these kids would need to use cursive in their lifetimes.  “Writing letters?” she asked. “Nope, they’ll type them.”  “Research notes?” “Nope, they won’t use paper.” “Let me help you out,” offered the consultant: “A signature.” Even for those in the business of educating the next generation, it can be hard to imagine the reach of their students’ future digital lives.

On the other hand, there is no shortage of art in the rest of the school. Corridor walls are bursting with 3-D extravaganzas. Children have created all manner of décor. There are paper trees growing out of walls, fluffy snowmen popping out, suspended robots and all manner of things that protrude and hang and dangle.

In the main hall, there is a column of pop-out paper cutting, in honor of a visit to Greenville by pop-up children’s book writer and illustrator Matthew Reinhart.  Each classroom I entered was a creative heaven— sculptures hanging from ceilings, bursts of color everywhere, busy work stations, clusters of buzzing activity, books, furniture, photos, and one empty “thinking chair.”