Only 1 more week of school left.
The reality, that kids are going to be home all-the-time, is starting to set in.
You might be trying to finalize and commit to summer activities for your children.
If you are on our mailing list, it is likely that you are considering coding camps.
And if you are considering coding camps, then you want to read this before enrolling them in one.
What typically happens is this…
When parents see their child has an interest in coding or believe that coding is something their child should know, they enroll her in a summer coding camp.
The child enjoys the 1-week camp. Things move on.
When winter break comes around, to the dismay of parents, the child has completely forgotten everything he or she has learned. The child doesn’t remember what a variable is. When someone asks him or her, “Can you code?” the answer is either “Not quite” or “Kind of”.
The #1 downside of summer coding camps is this: students forget everything they have learned in 6-9 months. They have to start from the beginning, again.
And the reason: lack of continuous learning.
We acquire meaningful skills when we learn them over time; when there is spaced repetition; when we get back to it over and over; when we continuously repeat the learning – doing cycle.
We don’t expect our child to learn piano or swimming in one summer. But for some reason, we expect them to learn to code in one summer.
Before you enroll them in a summer coding camp, ask yourself this question – What is your plan *after* the camp is over.
Unless your goal is to just keep them occupied while you can go to work, summer coding camp by itself isn’t enough. You need a continuous learning program for them to acquire this skill.
That is one reason we built CodeWizardsHQ as a structured program that students take over time until they have mastered coding. See our coding camps for kids.
If your child is starting out, he or she will enroll in the “Introduction to Programming” course.
We would teach them fundamental programming concepts like variables, loops, arrays, functions etc, all the while building super-fun projects.
The goal of our introductory course is to build a passion for coding. Many parents enroll their child in the program to see if their child would enjoy learning to code. By the end of the course, both the student and parent would know the answer.
Upon completion of the first course, they would go on to learn HTML/CSS and JavaScript in fall. They continue to build on what they learned during the summer. There is no abrupt ending.
With 1/week class once school starts, they get back to coding at a regular weekly interval. That continuous learning is crucial to making these skills stick.
This, we believe, is the only way to learn meaningful coding skills that your child will be able to use later on in the real world.
If you are looking for your child to learn coding in a way that sticks, I encourage you to find out more about our coding program and online summer camps.
