Don’t Edutain Young Coders With Sponsored Curricula — Teach Them (With Teachers)

Here’s a decidedly old-school take on the future-driven topic of engaging young, would-be coders: Don’t trick ’em; teach ‘em.

Most coding schools these days (though not my own) use edutainment to teach code to children. That is, they rely on coursework tied to wildly popular computer games such as Minecraft and Roblox to hold their students’ attention. The idea is that by making coding “fun,” kids stay engaged and therefore, learn more.

Unfortunately, these classes tend to do just one thing well, which is make students better at Minecraft or Roblox. What they don’t do is put kids on the best path toward actually becoming skilled coders. That’s what my goal is, and it’s accomplished by starting kids at the right age, preferably between 8 and 17, with Java or Python fundamentals and building on their skill set from there, just as college students do when taking introductory computer science classes.

More than 16 years running coding camps has taught me there’s no need to trick children into having fun with code, because code already is fun. Educational engagement, I’ve learned, is less about curriculum and more about the relationship between teacher and student.

While many coding schools boast of a 10-to-1 or even an 8-to-1 student-to-teacher ratio, at Coditum and SummerTech we rely on an otherwise unheard of 3-to-1 ratio. This is not because we don’t understand profit margins, rather because we recognize through experience that nothing engages and motivates young learners better than direct, constant support from teachers and peers.

Let’s look for a moment at music education, as my background also happens to include a long-ago stint as a keyboardist for a touring rock band. If you or I want to have our daughter learn an instrument, it’s unlikely we’ll make our hiring decision based on what app the instructor uses to help teach her how to play. Rather, we’ll make that decision based on the instructor’s reputation for engaging students and getting results.

Experience tells me kids best learn piano, or basketball or just about anything, not from YouTube but from a thoughtful, interesting, inquisitive instructor, as children have done for centuries. The same goes for coding, which is why we developed a proprietary curriculum that’s shaped by the interaction between our teachers and students. This is what works.

Yes, it’s quite a high wire act to espouse the importance of flesh-and-bone teachers over flashy computer programs when it comes to teaching kids about computing. That, however, is exactly what I’m doing here, because it’s clear to me that the success of my coding schools have been entirely tied to the strength of my teachers.

In fact, the vast majority of SummerTech and Coditum teachers are our former students. Having learned from and looked up to others, they now pass that knowledge — a curriculum they helped shape — onto the next generation.

And when that generation has free time, many immediately turn to Minecraft or similar virtual worlds. That’s great, because these platforms are indeed fun. After break time ends, however, today’s students do their best work in the real world, side by side with teachers and peers.

So if sponsored curriculum is a what a coding school is offering your child, be wary. Is it really teaching them how to code, or simply how to play a game?