There’s no time like summer to sit back, relax, and take a break from our ordinary routines. For kids, school is over, and they can enjoy more unstructured time to play with their friends.
The bliss of childhood is all about revelling in unadulterated play, yet children also need structure. Just like schools blend scheduled classes and recess for play, kids can’t just run around aimlessly for months.
RP4K offers coding camps and classes for kids over the summer that give children the structure and play they need while also imparting to them the skills of tomorrow that the workforce will need. Please keep reading to learn more about our summer sessions and how they’re different from what we normally offer during the school season.
The RP4K summer camp lets children enjoy fun but more intense coding sessions, which, like always, revolve around the creation of a video game. Daily sessions last for three hours, and you can select a one-week or two-week program.
Choose the morning or afternoon class, whichever you prefer. These summer sessions feel like a deeper dive into coding because students get so immersed in programming after doing it every day rather than once a week.
Students get accustomed to coding and become more fluent in it after doing it so much. The summer rhythm gives children more time for the math skills and good mental habits that the classes promote to really absorb and sink in.
Weekly classes are perfect when students also need to juggle a full day of school and other extra-curricular activities. But when schedules are more wide-open in the summer, it’s the perfect opportunity to really delve deeply into the material.
It wouldn’t be a summer session for kids unless it revolved around fun, and children are genuinely hungry to create their own video game. Everyone understands kids love playing video games, but coding games is its own challenge that also requires kids to exercise their creativity and problem-solving skills.
Learning to code with Real Programming 4 Kids always focuses on fun. We teach the skills and coding languages professional coders will have to know on the job but always emphasize fun.
Some coding programs for kids teach coding languages, giving them a sense of what programming is like, such as Scratch. Whatever utility there is in teaching drag-and-drop “coding languages” like Scratch, the fact is nobody uses them to build video games, apps, or programs that people buy.
RP4K is proud that any language we teach to kids is one that professionals use. Here are a few of the languages your child can learn by enrolling in the summer coding camp:
If you can code in languages like these, you’ll have the tools you need to make more than video games. A very wide range of industries relies on people who can use these languages to build front-and back-end programs for offices, along with apps, software, and, of course, video games.
The best schools have small classrooms because having your teacher’s attention is one of the best predictors of student success. When there are too many students per teacher, teachers have difficulty running structured and organized lessons, which in turn creates a challenging learning environment.
Students need extra attention when the subject matter is very new and potentially confusing, as may be with programming. It’s bad enough trying unsuccessfully to get your teacher’s attention during the school year, but it’s even worse when this happens in summer.
RP4K is proud to have a maximum of four students per teacher, so every pupil effortlessly receives the attention they need.
When students relate to the course material and their teachers, their learning potential is unlimited. RP4K makes it a point to hire young instructors who also played video games when they were younger.
Credit: BLACK17BG via Pixabay
The way video games are seen in society has changed a lot over the years. There’s a major difference learning from someone who, as a child, was passionate about computer games and knows first-hand what it’s like to be a young person enthralled with gaming.
Today, video games are taken seriously not only because they’re a multi-billion-dollar industry but for the way they combine elements of storytelling, design, and problem-solving skills. The best teachers for children are young adults with a lot of experience teaching and coding.
Our instructors all have backgrounds in Computer Science or Computer Engineering, and some have even gone on to design video games professionally for companies like Microsoft. Children don’t need an aloof coding savant that can program anything in the world but can’t relate to kids — we think they should have a teacher who is an expert in the subject and can make them excited to code.
Your child can code with Real Programming 4 Kids this summer without having to leave home or buy any new equipment. The only things needed to take the class are what you’ve probably already been using for months to keep in touch with friends and family — a computer with a microphone and a decent microphone.
It’s difficult for parents to change their kids’ plans according to rolling lockdowns. No matter how the COVID-19 numbers change in Ontario this summer, RP4K’s online coding courses for kids will be as schedules.
When kids play, they need a healthy mix of freedom and structure. Parents may associate summers with the outdoors rather than with more screen time, and, indeed, children need to get outside and run around! But they’ll also have a ton of fun this summer keeping their video game coding skills sharp, and if they accidentally pick up invaluable career skills from the RP4K coding camp along the way, then that can only be a good thing.
