We are excited to announce a free Breakout Mentors event to provide 4th to 7th graders their first taste of the Scratch programming environment! If you live in the Bay Area, join us on Thursday, July 5th in Mountain View for a fun introduction to computer programming. The last event was a huge success, but filled up quickly, so act fast! For more details and to register for the event, please head to our Eventbrite page. Photo: Karl-Ludwig [...]
Breakout Mentors focuses on providing personalized 1-on-1 programming mentoring for kids. We don’t do this because it is easy, but because it is the ideal way to make a significant and long-lasting impact on our student’s lives. In fact it is very hard – it would be much easier to run summer camps with scores of kids, simply skimming the surface of what computer programming is about. We strive to provide a real depth in education that isn’t available anywhere else. [...]
Last weekend’s Coder Dojo at GitHub was fun. 15 students were in attendance, with many younger students, including several under 10 years of age. There was an excellent and engaging teacher to lead the 2 hour session on Ruby Shoes. Everyone had a good time and learned a little about programming! The Coder Dojo approach to getting kids programming is quite different than the Hack the Future event for which I also previously volunteered. At Hack the Future there was less [...]
The Bay Area is fortunate enough to have a number of free events to introduce kids to programming. One of these is the Coder Dojo in San Francisco. Held every other Saturday at GitHub, volunteers host and teach young people to code. Twitter also has recently put on a Coder Dojo event. This weekend will be my first time volunteering so I don’t yet have many details to provide. I will post a recap next week. Click here to sign up [...]
Computer programming is largely pursued by men, while women are often on the sidelines. Why is that? How do you reverse the trend so that your daughter can unlock the incredible benefits of having an understanding how to program? There are many factors that contribute to boys coding more than girls. Some biological, like differences in how their brains are preconditioned. Some environmental, like the lock-in effects of 90% of programmers currently being male. But both of these can be overcome [...]
Unfortunately there is not a specific age that everyone is ready to start learning advanced programming concepts. Not everyone is blessed with the same logical thinking skills and young kids develop them at different times. It is a bell curve, but here are some guidelines we’ve found from working with dozens of students: Most 11 year-olds Above average 10 year-olds Extremely smart 9 year-olds and younger “Smart” and “above average” can mean many different things. Here I am talking about analytic [...]