We’re considering teaching children to code this year.

Finding a good way to give back to the community is something that we’ve been thinking about for quite some time now. Many ideas have floated around from food drives to fundraisers but we want to do something a little different. We would love to find a way to make an immediate impact, but we understand sometimes that’s not always possible so we’ve opted instead for a longterm impact through teaching coding to children. As exciting as this is to us it’s also quite intimidating as we’ve never taught before (at least not in an academic setting) and frankly we don’t seen ourselves as teachers. What could they possibly learn from us?

This mentality is probably what has kept us paralyzed from putting this plan into action sooner than later but during that time we’ve gained so much experience in this industry that any education we could provide today will be exponentially better than that of yesterday. Our mission now is to share that knowledge with our leaders of the future.

Coding programs for children have been around for well over a decade and in our eyes, they are still in their infancy. With the use of tech becoming more prevalent in our society the demand for technical skilled jobs grows more each and everyday. Not to mention tech jobs are amongst the top paid professions in the world so If we can somehow give the children a leg up, mission complete.

Talking about the idea is great but the planning and implementation is key. In order to achieve this mission we plan to acquire a small location that we can turn into a classroom that can hold 20 students. We’d also like to provide up to 20 computers for the classroom in order to make this education available to all. As there is a price of entry to the tech world, having this computer lab would allow those who may not be able to afford a laptop to attend. Equally students who do have laptops would have the ability to bring in.

Regarding a curriculum, we’d like to keep apply the KISS principle (Keep It Simple Stupid). Since we’re web developers, we’ll be teaching children how to build their own websites from scratch. Now we don’t have this all figured out yet but we think the best way to go about it is to just start with the basics. Some general internet history, teach HTML, CSS and Javascript and end it all off with a final project for them to build a website of their choice.

There is still much detail and planning required to get this thing rolling but all in all we just want to teach the children a skill that they can possibly one day look back on a say wow “I learned that in a coding class as a child”.