Category Archives: Coding Education

Coding Education, Education

Why Many Schools Are Not Making Investments in Coding

Investing in coding would seem like common sense at this point. However, schools in all parts of the world who have the ability to make that investment are refusing to do so. Consider a recent article for Computer Weekly titled “One-third of schools admit to making no investment in coding training for teachers.”

Claire McDonald of Computer Weekly writes, “One-third of schools admit they have not invested any money in training teachers to deliver the new computing curriculum, according to research. Freedom of information (FOI) requests by enterprise software company MapR have revealed that the support teachers are receiving is inconsistent across the country, with some schools investing nothing in training and others investing more than £3,000. Paul Tarantino, director at MapR Technologies, said: ‘Last year the government pledged £3.5m on new curriculum training. But this information shows that it’s simply not being filtered down so that every young person has a trained teacher. It’s shocking to see such a huge discrepancy in what was said in the run-up to the election compared to what these promises have translated to on the ground.’ Of those asked, 22% were investing over £3,000 on training teachers to deliver the computer science curriculum, 33% spent between £500 and £1,000, while 11% spent between £100 and £500.”

To understand why making an investment in coding is so important, consider a recent article for Forbes titled “How The Coding Explosion Has Changed The Programmer Job Market.” Harsh Patel of Forbes writes, “In the past two decades, the landscape for computer science has changed. Part of this comes from a general increase in education availability: from traditional CS degrees to online learning and coding bootcamps like ours, nearly everyone has access to learn programming if they want to. The other part stems from the technology itself. In the 1990s, coding was based around singular purposes — enterprise applications, self-contained games and custom databases for corporations. In the 2000s, the rapid growth of always-on Internet connections and the emergence of smartphones added new layers of security, small phone-based apps, cloud-based interfaces and databases, and increasingly complex web environments. Now, software systems power everything from tablets to car systems to home appliances. As a result, the United States job market is undergoing a dramatic shift, such that by 2020 nearly one million coding jobs will be unfulfilled based on projections from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. With the field of computer science rapidly expanding, key traits for smart hiring in the field have changed from even just a few years ago.”

To prepare your child for this job climate where coders are in high demand, you need personalized coding education. At CodeRev Kids, we customize all of our lessons to fit your child’s expertise.

Our lessons emphasize computational thinking, which encompasses a wide range of programming concepts and languages. Students can choose from a variety of different tracks, including robotics, app making, and website development.

Although we are the most educational camp out there, we also keep the focus on having fun. As a result, your child is both engaged and receiving a top flight education at the same time.

If you’re looking to take your child’s coding skills to the next level, check out our afterschool programs and fall classes!

Coding Curriculum, Coding Education

National Coding Week Was a Blast!

Coding enthusiasts rejoice! National Coding Week just happened in the UK. Electronics Weekly takes  a look at the event a recent article titled “National Coding Week aims at adult learners.”

According to the author of the article, “Taking place over September 21-27, there will be free-to-attend training sessions across the UK, where people will be taught the basics of coding alongside other beginners with little or no previous knowledge. There is a clickable event map on the National Coding Week website. ‘The key aims of National Coding Week are to encourage adults of any age to learn an element of computer coding, to encourage digital experts to share their skills, and to collaborate, share, learn and have fun,’ said event co-founder Richard Rolfe. ‘If I can learn to code at age 51 then anyone can.’ According to organisers, 52% of adults in the UK said they would feel ‘extremely or very daunted’ at the prospect of learning to code, while 41.3% believed that the older they are, the harder it is to pick up a skill like coding.”

The Bend Bulletin explores the rise in adult coding camps in a recent article titled “Adult coding camps boom as employers seek tech-savvy workers.” Kathleen Gallagher of the Bend Bulletin writes, “With eight employer requests for every student currently accepted into its computer coding classes, Milwaukee-based DevCodeCamp is expanding the amount of space it leases and the number of students it will train. It’s all part of an educational coding surge that is happening in many other cities, as well. This school — the first of its sort in Wisconsin — is taking an additional 2,500 square feet in Ward4 Milwaukee, a co-working space just south of downtown Milwaukee, said founder Jim Brent. The expansion will nearly double the space it occupies. DevCodeCamp, which since June has been running intensive computer coding boot camps here that last for months, rather than years, is attracting pilots, teachers, sales reps and others from a range of occupations, Brent said. All of them are seeking the same thing: good-paying technology jobs with employers who are begging for this type of talent.”

With so many adults trying to catch up with coding, it’s clear that young people who got their education early have a decided advantage. To give your child an advantage in the future job market, your best bet is personalized coding education.

At CodeRev Kids, we customize your child’s lesson plan. Our curriculum emphasizes computational thinking, which encompasses a wide range of programming languages.

While our customized lesson plans provides a thorough education for your child, we also like to focus on having fun. As a result, your child leaves both highly educated and motivated.

For more information, check out our afterschool programs and fall classes!

Coding Education

Seeing Rewards for Coding Early

When we talk about coding, the conversation is often in the context of the future. We discuss filling the need for technology-related jobs. The conversation veers to a competition with young coders in other countries. However, sometimes, it’s most effective to stay in the present. Viacom takes a look at how some students are seeing immediate coding rewards in a recent article titled “Look What These Girls Can Do: A Summer of Coding Wraps at Viacom.”

Stuart Winchester of Viacom writes, “This summer at Viacom’s New York City headquarters, 20 girls learned that coding can do exactly that, creating these experiences with skills learned through Girls Who Code (GWC), an organization built to inspire, educate and equip girls with the computing skills to pursue 21st century opportunities. Last week, these girls gathered with their families and teachers, Viacom staff and GWC staff to demo these final projects and celebrate a remarkable summer. ‘From speakers to mentors to my fellow coders, we all believe in the Girls Who Code message – that females can and will achieve greatness in the STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] fields,’ said Sejal Mehra, who represented her class with remarks. ‘Over the summer, we not only learned how to code, but have also made 22 new best friends. I know for a fact that when we leave this week, our friendships will grow with our coding abilities.’”

The Roanoke Times reports on a coding competition with governmental implications in a recent article titled “Coding competition: Time running out to try to help government.” Yann Ranaivo of the Roanoke Times writes, “A competition for coders across the state to build and submit software aimed at making Virginia government more efficient and transparent is entering its final keyboard clicks. The software submission, with a Sept. 2 deadline, is part of Datathon 2015 — a competition that lets coders use open state data to build apps for platforms that include the Internet, personal computers and smartphones. Top projects will be chosen during regional events throughout the state before they are presented at a final event in Richmond, according to the competition’s website. The person or persons responsible for the winning entry will meet with the evaluation panel with a goal of launching the idea as a business. The data participants must use for their applications can be found at data.virginia.gov, where they can find datasets on education, agriculture, elections, health and human resources and public safety. Participants are asked to use at least one dataset. Submissions, according to the site, must include a paragraph explaining the app’s purpose, functions, intended audience and problems it aims to address. They also must include a text description of the app, a narrated video demonstration of the app and a link to the software.”

When it comes to youth coding education, no one provides a better, customized coding education than CodeRev Kids. At CodeRev Kids, we emphasized computational thinking, which encompasses a wide range of programming concepts and languages. Our lessons build upon one another and we adjust starting points to each student’s level of expertise.

We are known for saying we are the most educational tech camp out there but we also keep the focus on having fun. As a result, students stay engaged while learning to blend creativity with technology.We offer tracks focusing on everything from robotics to website development, to app making.

If you’re looking to give your child the foundation he/she needs to be a successful coder, sign up for one of our afterschool programs today!

Coding Education

Facebook’s Spam-Killer and Peeking into the Future of Coding

What can Facebook’s new spam killer tell us about coding? Wired Magazine attempts to tell us the answer in a recent article titled “Facebook’s New Spam-Killer Hints at the Future of Coding.”

Cade Metz of Wired writes, “LOUIS BRANDY PAUSES before answering, needing some extra time to choose his words. ‘I’m going to get in so much trouble,’ he says. The question, you see, touches on an eternally controversial topic: the future of computer programming languages. Brandy is a software engineer at Facebook, and alongside a team of other Facebookers, he spent the last two years rebuilding the system that removes spam—malicious, offensive, or otherwise unwanted messages—from the world’s largest social network. That’s no small task—Facebook juggles messages from more than 1.5 billion people worldwide—and to tackle the problem, Brandy and team made an unusual choice: they used a programming language called Haskell. In the early ’90s, a committee of academics built Haskell as a kind of experiment in language design, and all these years later, it remains on the fringes of mainstream programming. At GitHub—the primary repository for software code on the ‘net—Haskell ranks 23rd on the list of the most popular languages. Even so, Facebook chose it as the basis for its enormously complex anti-spam system, which went live earlier this year. As I chat with Brandy inside the new Facebook building in Menlo Park, California, I’m trying to understand what this choice says about the evolution of programming languages as a whole. That may seem an innocent enough question, but any straightforward discussion of the merits of one programming language over another is inevitably met with at least a modicum of vitriol as it spills into the wider community of software developers. Coders choose programming languages for any number of technical reasons, but they also choose them for very personal reasons—and these personal reasons inevitably intertwine with the technical. If Brandy praises Haskell too heavily—or indeed criticizes it too heavily—so many others will cry foul. They’ll probably cry foul anyway.”

One way or another, the future of coding will most likely involve your child as more jobs make these skills a requirement. In order to prepare your child for this economy, you need quality, early coding education. When it comes to youth coding education, no one does it better than CodeRev Kids.

At CodeRev Kids, we emphasize computational thinking, which encompasses a wide range of programming concepts and languages. These lessons build upon one another and we adjust starting points to each student’s level of expertise; thus, the entire curriculum is customized.

Furthermore, we keep the focus on having fun. As a result, students stay engaged while learning to blend creativity with technology.

For more information, check out our afterschool programs!

Coding Curriculum, Coding Education

Leveling the Playing Field with Coding

Structural and systemic inequality are realities of the school and work world. Growth industries like coding provide the opportunities to level the playing field for underrepresented groups. Consider a recent article for the Huffington Post titled “Coding: The Ultimate Equalizer.”

Joel S. Bloom of the Huffington Post writes, “Should ‘coding’ be taught in all-American public schools? We know the U.S. is falling behind the rest of the globe in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields. By exposing kids to coding, starting in kindergarten, we give them the tools they need to both compete and make smart life choices in a digital world. Coding is how technology, including software, apps and websites, is created. There are thousands of coding languages, such as JavaScript, Python and SQL, and early exposure helps young people understand and interact with the devices that provide the means to shape our technology-driven culture. Coding is valuable in that it teaches problem solving, design and innovation. It is practical in that it creates solutions to immediate challenges. It is creative in that it allows people to imagine and invent with few boundaries. It is liberating in that one can go from knowing code to owning one’s own company. It is equalizing in that code is not limited by the stigmas humans readily cling to, such as race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion. But even more exciting, children love to code. That’s why the U.K. last year infused coding into the national curriculum starting at age 5. That’s why there are movements all across Asia to get young people, particularly girls, to code. They understand that you don’t expose young people to code simply to create a bunch of computer scientists. Exposure to coding can open up a love of learning that builds pathways to other critical skills, including many important ones in STEM.”

Even if coding were taught in all public schools, there is still a major need for individualized lesson plans. The only place to find this style of customized education is with a program like CodeRev Kids.

At CodeRev Kids our students learn computational thinking, which encompasses a wide range of programming concepts and languages. Our lessons build upon one another and we adjust starting points to each student’s level of expertise, making the entire curriculum customized. Even though we are known for saying we are the most educational tech camp out there, we also keep the focus on having fun. As a result, students stay engaged while learning to blend creativity with technology.

Whatever youth coding education needs you might have, we’ve got you covered at CodeRev Kids!

Coding Education

Why Do Parents and Schools Disagree About Coding?

While parents across the country are pushing to get more coding in schools, recent research shows there is a serious disconnect between their sentiments and those of the schools. USA Today explores this in a recent article titled “Should students learn coding? Students, schools disagree, poll finds.”

Marco della Cava of USA Today writes, “Parents across the U.S. are eager for their children to learn coding and other computer-science skills, but their message hasn’t yet hit the in-box of school administrators. That’s the finding of a new Gallup study commissioned by Google that spotlights a potentially perilous economic disconnect as tech companies struggle to enlarge their engineering talent pools. In the works for 18 months, the survey, called ‘Searching for Computer Science: Access and Barriers in U.S. K-12 Education,’ polled 15,000 people ranging from students to superintendents. Among key and contrasting findings: while 90% of parents see computer science, or CS, as ‘a good use of school resources’ (and 67% say CS should be required learning alongside other core classes), fewer than 8% of administrators believe parent demand is high. They also cite a lack of trained teachers as a top barrier to offering CS courses. Three quarters of principals report no CS programs in their school.”

Meanwhile, in Kentucky, one businessman is certain that teaching coding isn’t just important for students’ skills; it’s necessary for our economy. WYMT 57 takes a look at this in a recent article titled “President of company says coding is a solution to the economy.” According to the author of the article, “The president of bitsource says that the company focuses on the technological needs of other entities, but also men and women in need of a job. Bitsource is new to Pikeville. The owners discovered a need for it when they were forced to search for business outside of the mountains. One co-owner, Rusty Justice, says it started with the need for a website, but then turned into something more. ‘We’ve always made our business in the coal industry and so we were looking for something to do to help these wonderful people we’ve worked with. We knew how talented and capable they were.’”

If you’re looking to provide your child with a quality coding education, your best bet is CodeRev Kids. At CodeRev Kids, we customize our lessons to fit your child’s specific needs.

Our students learn Computational Thinking, which encompasses a wide range of programming concepts and languages. Although we are known for saying we are the most educational tech camp out there, we also keep the focus on having fun. As a result, our students stay engaged while learning to blend creativity with technology.

With CodeRev Kids, students can choose from five different tracks, each of which begins with introductory concepts which then lead to intermediate and advanced topics. These tracks include everything from creating games to making apps to building robots.

If you think CodeRev Kids could be right for your child, get signed up today!

Coding Curriculum, Coding Education

Kids Code the Darndest Things

When you give children some space for creativity, it’s amazing what they can do. Consider a recent article for the Huffington Post titled “These Kids Spent 8 Hours Coding And Broke A Guinness World Record.”

Rebecca Klein of the Huffington Post writes, “July 30 was a big day for over 1,000 members of Boys and Girls Clubs in the Seattle area: They learned how to code, and they broke a Guinness world record. A total of 1,337 students gathered at the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, for a free coding camp that was also an attempt to break the record for the ‘most people trained in computer programming in eight hours.’ Microsoft approached Guinness when it had the idea to host the marathon training session. Guinness World Records set a benchmark of 1,300 students who had to take part, Microsoft representative Katie Fazzolari told The Huffington Post. The kids participated in coding activities, like learning how to do commands, and had to create a game. They had to demonstrate that they had finished their tasks for their time to count for the world record.”

Cool Mom Tech also highlights youth coding creativity in a recent article titled “9 awesomely cool coding projects for kids using the Dot and Dash robots from Wonder Workshop.” Liz of Cool Mom Tech writes, “Recently, I wrote about how totally in love I am with the Dot and Dash Robots from Wonder Workshop. So it makes me extra happy that they have joined us as as our newest Cool Mom Tech sponsor because, well, we all adore them! (Also, so does every kid who comes over and begs to play with ‘those cool blue robot things’ that have a permanent home in our living room.) What’s even better is that the free Blockly app (iOS and Android) that pairs with the robots has a new update every single week, meaning it’s constantly packed with tons of new puzzles and playful projects that are actually doable without an engineering degree, thanks to an easy drag-and-drop visual coding platform that’s perfect for kids about 8 and up. Maybe a little younger with your help.”

When it comes to youth coding education, nothing gives your child the opportunity to grow quite like CodeRev Kids. Our customized coding education emphasizes computational thinking, which encompasses a wide range of programming concepts and languages. Our lessons build upon one another and we adjust starting points to each student’s level of expertise.

We are known for saying we are the most educational tech camp out there, but we also keep the focus on having fun. As a result, our students stay engaged while learning to blend creativity with technology. With us, children can explore coding through robotics, building apps, designing websites, creating games, and much more.

If you are looking to give your child a quality coding education, look no further than CodeRev Kids!

Coding Curriculum, Coding Education

CodeCloud Seeks to Help Adults Learn Coding on the Move

For adults trying to catch up on their coding knowledge, it generally requires a class. However, a Seoul/Singapore startup is looking to create an app that allows them to learn coding on the move. E27 takes a look at this in a recent article titled “CodeCloud is an interactive coding platform that gets you a job.”

Iris Leung of E27 writes, “Within the past few years, coding as a skill became anybody’s game with the likes of rap star Will.i.am telling the media that code can help fight global inequality. World leaders also followed suite, with Obama became the first President to write a line of code and Singapore PM Lee Hsien Loong recently showed his C++ prowess by sharing his source code for a Sudoku solver. Online and physical coding schools have also cropped up ranging from easygoing interactive platforms like Codecademy to all out four-month curricula from General Assembly. Between the freemium models and fairly steep tuition costs, are students of these programs actually landing development gigs after? CodeCloud, a new interactive coding platform, wants to bridge that gap. Claiming to be the only ‘school’ that that lets users build projects for real companies, the one-year-old Singapore/Seoul startup (and incoming JFDI incubatee) already has had three projects completed included an Airbnb-Expedia mashup and a Bitcoin trading bot that uses machine learning and natural language recognition to predict movements in the cryptocurrency realm… Mike De’Shazer, NYC coding school App Factory Founder and CodeCloud Co-Founder believes that adult neophyte coders need a solution that’s fun, non-committal and actually leads to job opportunities. More importantly, it needs to be a passive way for people to learn at their leisure, which is why CodeCloud’s is plugging away on a free mobile game where budding coders can absentmindly tap away on their daily commutes. ‘The whole thing is very interactive and touch-enabled. Essentially the way it works is you drag words into slots. You start with very simple code then it gets more complex so this is a way that people can learn how to code passively. We found that there’s a huge gap — most adults that want to learn how to code don’t have the time. But they have time on the train or bus, so we realized that we needed to create a mobile experience,’ he said.”

No app, however, can make up for a classroom environment with an experienced educator. At CodeRev Kids, we provide just that, as well as a customized curriculum to give your child a solid foundation in coding.

Our curriculum emphasizes computational thinking, which encompasses a wide range of programming concepts and languages. The lessons build upon one another and we adjust starting points to each student’s level of expertise. Thus, the entire curriculum is customized.

Furthermore, while we are known for saying we are the most educational tech camp out there, we also keep the focus on having fun. By doing this, our students stay engaged while learning to blend creativity with technology. Our learning tracks include robotics, apps, websites, and game development.

There is no better place for your child to develop coding skills than CodeRev Kids!

Coding Curriculum, Coding Education

Harvard Scientist Codes a Movie onto DNA

How do you store your data? Flash drive? External hard drive? The Cloud? A Harvard scientist is trying to create a new, more organic storage space: DNA. The Los Angeles Daily News takes a look at this in a recent article titled “This Harvard scientist is coding an entire movie onto DNA.”

Emilie Munson of the Los Angeles Daily News writes, “What if all the information on the internet could be stored in a drop of liquid the size of a quarter? What if billions of copies of that information could be made in minutes? And what if it were guaranteed that all that information would be safe not just for your lifetime, but for millions of lifetimes? Sounds like wishful thinking, right? To Harvard genetics professor Dr. George Church, it sounds like the future. Church is one of the world’s premier DNA scientists. He made headlines recently for his research attempting to bring the wooly mammoth back from extinction. His many contributions since the 1980s include developing anti-cancer nano-robots and detectors for dark matter. Somewhat more obscurely, he’s the inventor of CRISPR, which allows scientists to elegantly cut and paste DNA, enabling the removal of undesirable chromosomes, among other applications. In 2014, scientists in Church’s lab successfully used CRISPR to cure mice of liver disease. Now, Church is focused on doing something no other scientist has succeeded in doing: coding a film onto tiny strands of DNA.”

Munson goes on to describe the process of coding the movie into DNA. She writes, “The DNA that Church is using to store ‘A Trip to the Moon’ is different from that found in living organisms. Instead, it is ‘unnatural DNA,’ crafted to be denser and more robust, perfected for storing high quantities of information. The process of coding the film to DNA is fairly complicated, but in simple terms, it goes something like this:

Every movie image is made up of hundreds of tiny pixels, each of a specific color. Church assigns each pixel a code made up of zeros and ones, for example 001001, based on its color. This code is then converted into adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T), the chemical bases that make up DNA.”

The things we can do with coding are truly fascinating. But no matter what wild things scientists and programmers do, there is one common thread: a quality coding education.

If you want to give your child a customized, high quality coding education, your best bet is CodeRev Kids. At CodeRev Kids, we emphasize computational thinking, which encompasses a wide range of programming concepts and languages. Our lessons build upon one another and we adjust starting points to each student’s level of expertise, making the entire curriculum customized. We may be known for having the most educational tech camp out there, but we also keep the focus on having fun. As a result, students stay engaged while learning to blend creativity with technology.

If you’re looking to take your child’s coding education to the next level, you can’t go wrong with CodeRev Kids!

Coding Curriculum, Coding Education

New App Helps Developers Locate Coding Problems

Often times, we think of coding in terms of creating things to make life easier for consumers. Recently, SourceDNA decided to offer up a product to aid developers. Venture Beat explores this in a recent article titled “SourceDNA launches Searchlight, a developer tool to find coding problems in any app.”

Ken Yeung of Venture Beat writes, “‘People think about the most obvious ways to solve problems. With developers, it’s solving a problem when they’re writing the code,’ said Lawson. ‘Most people don’t think about reviewing their work after the code has been written. You have to do a lot of detective work.’ What Lawson is referring to is that developers aren’t always looking deep into their code to find out what’s broken and needs to be fixed. Often it might just be a referral to a code library and if something is broken, it can be difficult to find out which customers are affected by the bad code. This is something SourceDNA wants to showcase — its ability to give developers the tools to build better apps than are currently out in the marketplace. Lawson explained that the company is already scanning through 60,000 apps a day, but is still playing catch-up. However, the service is something existing marketplaces don’t provide: When you submit an app to Apple or Google, the reviewers are going to make sure that the app doesn’t violate any of its standards. They won’t examine the code to see if there are any potential problems in the code itself. SourceDNA takes things one step further. Originally geared as a business intelligence service (think Nielsen for apps), SourceDNA has moved beyond telling companies about app trends to helping developers figure out what’s wrong with their apps. Lawson and his team have spent more than three years working on SourceDNA and seem to have found success with its BI unit. Today, it’s also targeting developers as a new audience, so now the company is addressing both sides of the ecosystem.”

In order to put your child in a position to build a career as a developer, you need to start with early coding education. When it comes to coding education, your best bet is CodeRev Kids.

At CodeRev Kids, we emphasize computational thinking, which encompasses a wide range of programming concepts and languages. The lessons build upon one another and we adjust starting points to each student’s level of expertise. Thus, the entire curriculum is customized.

Furthermore, while we are known for saying we are the most educational tech camp out there, we also keep the focus on having fun. By doing this, our students stay engaged while learning to blend creativity with technology.

If you’re looking to begin or further your child’s coding education, there’s no better choice than CodeRev Kids!