Code4Kids. From side project to 10,000 students coding every week.

This is the story of how we’re on a mission to revolutionize the school classroom. A story that started by mistake. 

For the past year we’ve been working with hundreds of schools to implement a coding, robotics and IT curriculum into their junior school classroom and computer lab.

We’ve been blown away by the incredible teachers and schools we’re meeting every week, we can barely keep up with the pace. Now close to 10 000 students, aged 8 to 15, are learning to code through our program every week.

Today marks our public launch. The next step on our journey to turning future generations into world-class problem solvers.

It started as a side project:

Code4Kids started by mistake. It was something we discovered, a path we followed, rather than something we set out to do with a definite destination in mind. 

In the beginning the goal was simple: I wanted to teach my 8 year-old niece how to code. 

Why is coding so important? I didn’t start out with an answer. I simply knew that the entire trajectory of my life had been shifted by the idea that I could make a computer do something for me. I could build a website, sell something online, or write a piece of software to save me time or to solve difficult problems.

That is all coding and programming is: humans speaking to computers in a language the computer understands.

I really wanted my niece to learn to speak this language. Not because I had dreams of her becoming a software engineer (although, now 11 years old, she could probably start applying for jobs), but because I wanted her to see how malleable the world actually is. I wanted her to try to solve problems creatively, pay attention to detail, fail, try again, and build resilience when things aren’t all going smoothly. 

There’s a certain magic when you can type something into a text editor or console, and the computer takes what you’ve typed, interprets it, and hands you an answer on the other side. Knowing how to code, how to create something from nothing, that is yours (and that works!) can shift the way you see the world. It opens your mind to start to see the endless opportunities around you to make the world a better place.

From my niece to her classmates

After a year or two of teaching her to code, my niece let me know that their school computer teacher was leaving and that the school might cancel the computer lesson. My ears perked. You can’t cancel your computer lesson! This is probably one of the most important hours of the week. 

I asked her what sort of things they did in computers, and I was rather disappointed to discover that my niece and her classmates were doing similar things in their lessons that I had done in junior school about 20 years (and about 20 fewer megabits per second worth of bandwidth) earlier. 

Armed with a mission, and only a vague plan, I scheduled a meeting with the headmistress to plead her to let our current tutoring company (SkillUp) take over the computer lesson. Just for one term. I confessed to her that I didn’t have much of a curriculum. I only had an idea of the next couple of steps of the journey, but promised to make sure the students would be learning something and having fun while doing it. 

To my absolute astonishment, she said we could give it a go. 

That headmistress, her team of teachers and advisors will go down in history as my heroes. 

I then went back to my team and proudly proclaimed that we’d just signed up a school as our first client for our primary school coding program, Code4Kids (that didn’t yet exist). 

My team, being some of the best humans on the planet, looked at me, shook their heads, and then got to work at rocket speed.

Over the next three months we worked non-stop: we started designing our curriculums, building software to deliver it, hiring some brilliant teachers (who are still with us), and meeting with hundreds of schools, teachers, parents and industry experts. We wanted to make sure that the students were engaged, excited and growing, while learning relevant content, real tools, and practicing real-world problem-solving.

The class I wish I had when I was in school was starting to take shape.

Students were speaking, teaching, listening, failing, trying, building resilience, reading problems carefully, asking the right questions, and ultimately taking ownership of getting themselves and each other through each lesson. 

Our teaching strategy was quite simple. Our instructions to the teacher was this: Never Ever Just Give The Answer. If a student ever had a problem we made sure the teacher followed a three-step approach:

• Step 1: Make sure the student has tried! Can a teacher see the student has tried, attempted the problem, made a mistake? If not, all you do is tell them to read the question and try. If they have tried, step 2:
• Step 2: Ask your neighbour. A student MUST ask their neighbour for help, and when the neighbour helps they can only do so with their Mouth But No Mouse, we want students to become teachers, team workers, humble, patient, kind, and willing to teach. If they have asked their neighbours but they are still stuck (technically everyone in the class should be stuck, which rarely occurs), then move onto step 3. 
• Step 3: Answer only in the Socratic method. i.e. answer the question with a question of your own. “What if you try this?” “What would happen if you did that?” “Why did you write that?” This step is gold. It means the teacher never needs to have all the answers. 

We make sure teachers are as disciplined about this as possible. If the lesson was too hard we double down on improving the content and if it was too easy we add more creative open-ended challenges. We also started making sure our curriculum following the well-thought standards of the International Society for Technological Education, ISTE - brilliant stuff!

In the first lessons, there are a couple of hands going up, but by lesson three the students are problem-solving, doing it themselves. It's really amazing to see! The teacher is there to guide, challenge and encourage. We put a lot of focus on teacher training.

The students are learning to code, using real programming languages. The same languages that engineers at Google, Youtube or Facebook use every day. They’re learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript, not dragging and dropping or playing games. Some new courses include Robotics, Microsoft Excel, and Engineering Drawing, to name a few. However, the students aren’t just learning to code. The content they're coding around is interleaved with their other school subjects. They’re learning about their country (see lesson 1 here), the solar system, famous women in history, sustainable energy, Cartesian coordinate systems, responsible behaviour on the internet, and many more.

Although these students are 8 to 15 years old, they are learning things that typically only get taught in university. But in a far more fun, engaging, and collaborative way.

One to one-hundred schools. 

We were just having the best time, seeing how much students were enjoying the program, seeing how quickly they were soaking it up. Parents and schools were giving positive feedback and many students were logging in at home after school to work on their projects.

It is our goal to reach 1 million students using the program in the next two years ? we’re 1% of the way!

Our mission is to make education real, relevant, and empowering. We want to plant a seed in a student that shows them they can do anything they put their minds and efforts towards.

We have no idea what these students will do in the future, but at least they now know they’re capable of doing things that at first seem impossible.

For more information, check the website here: www.getcode4kids.com or contact us on [email protected]