Kids learn a lot more than the course material from their classes. The class may revolve around learning French, science, literature, history, or whatever else, but students absorb many indirect, secondary lessons.
The public school system is designed not merely to impart domain knowledge to kids, but to help them socialize and collaborate with their peers, to become more engaged citizens, neighbours, and people. They might be reading a book about one specific subject, but they learn broad life lessons they’ll draw on for years to come.
Similarly, kids enrolled in RP4K’s summer coding camps walk away with foundational programming skills that employers seek. They also become independent thinkers with considerable leadership skills. Let’s look now at how RP4K’s summer coding helps develop better leaders.
Leaders need to be confident in their assessments of a situation. Reading a problem accurately is fundamental to reaching a workable solution. Leaders must hear the group and understand their views and reasoning, but they also need to believe in themselves and trust their instincts.
When kids learn to code online, they need to test their assumptions and reevaluate what does and doesn’t work constantly. They can’t just lean on their prior beliefs until it works. Coding can entertain different approaches, so different students can arrive at success by different roads, one of their choosing, one that suits their temperament and habits of mind.
Coding is one of the best ways to get young kids to adopt the outside-the-box approach to thinking associated with engineers.
Leaders need to inspire confidence in their teams, which means they need to feel that way themselves. If a leader tries to fake confidence, peers can usually smell it. Real confidence is built on a foundation of healthy self-esteem.
When kids learn to code over the summer at RP4K, they also learn to believe in themselves. The coding process requires hypothesizing about potential solutions, accepting that many of them won’t work, but that they’re all a necessary step towards finding the one that will.
In other words, mistakes are built into the coding process. This reinforces that “mistakes” are not something kids should beat themselves up over. Instead, they’re an inevitable part of the right process. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of this lesson!
Kids will walk out of our programming classes with a healthy understanding of and higher tolerance for mistakes, which will help them in later grades and eventually in the workforce. When children struggle to accept errors they inevitably make in their homework or in any other domain, they may feel an overwhelming pressure spiral that only worsens.
Leaders need proper guidance along the way. Our small classroom environment helps each student feel heard, seen, and supported. Just like our year-round classes, RP4K’s summer coding camp caps each class size at four students, so there are at most three other students in your child’s class.
We guarantee that the session will run when you book it, even if your child is the only student! RP4K doesn’t believe in mandatory minimums. No matter how popular our courses are, the classrooms are always small, with a teacher-student ratio of at most 4:1, so teachers can focus on the course material instead of calming disruptive learning environments.
Many public and private schools now offer coding classes to older students, which is why many parents enroll their kids in classes when they’re younger, so they’ll be more than prepared. RP4K’s most advanced courses contain math concepts students would otherwise only encounter in university math classes!
We also offer a new AI course that lets experienced students peer behind the curtains and the hype to grasp the concept currently taking the world by storm. RP4K’s classes more challenging classes are quite advanced, but we also have stimulating, exciting lessons for people of all levels, including total beginners.
Our goal is to make coding fun and engaging by ensuring kids have the right amount on their plate. If the material is too easy, they’ll tire of it soon. Too hard, and they’ll be overwhelmed.
We’re proud to teach the most popular, in-demand coding languages:
Other schools rely on programs like Scratch, which is really a drag-and-drop program designed to convey in a basic sense what coding is like. In contrast, RP4K teaches coding languages that professionals use every day, which means students are likely to see them in later grades.
School coding classes aside, RP4K classes also teach fundamental math concepts such as vectors, integers, and even trigonometry. Today’s coding students will lead the way later on in school and beyond.
Our coding classes provide many practical and secondary benefits to students, but this is still a summer program for kids, and nothing matters more than having fun! Kids who enjoy learning become lifelong learners, and they also engage more fully with the course material.
But let’s put these considerations aside for a moment. For over 20 years, we’ve put video games at the centre of every lesson by teaching kids how to design and code their own video game. When they’re finished their project, they’ll be able to play and show off their creation with friends and family. Kids will yearn to work on their coding projects with the same enthusiasm they put into playing video games.
That’s no mistake! Not only do we teach them how to create video games. We also embed gamification concepts into the lessons, harnessing the same tricks video games use to make our classes more engaging and exciting.
Kids who genuinely love coding have a great foundation to become a coding advocate in later grades and help lead their peer groups today.
Developing leadership skills in today’s youth is important, especially in new, digital domains like coding. After all, coding leaders are more likely to shape the technology of the future, rather than get shaped by it. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have questions about our coding classes or would like to enroll today to help your child become a better leader tomorrow.
