Is there anytime more precious for kids than the summer break? School is over, and the only thing there is to do is play and have fun. However, just because kids have time to play does not mean they aren’t learning!
In fact, play is one of the primary ways kids learn. Through play, kids touch, probe, and absorb knowledge like a sponge. Parents understand that summer is a time for kids to enjoy a break from formal schooling, but many want their children to have a fun and productive time.
Thankfully, summer coding classes for kids make learning fun with generous, deep-dive sessions that revolve around creating a real video game. Please read on to learn how our summer online coding classes balance fun and education.
Motivated students are better learners because they don’t need to be forced. They’re genuinely hungry to learn, so they push themselves. Kids drive themselves to learn coding when the goal of the classes is creating a video game they can play afterwards with their friends and family.
Even kids taking up coding for the first time will walk away from the class having created their own video game. More experienced coders can expand their skills within a coding language before advancing to one that’s more challenging.
RP4K takes pride in making computer programming for kids as fun as playing video games. Not only is designing and creating a video game the goal of the class, but we also use gamification dynamics to make sessions more engaging.
RP4K tracks the kids’ progress to help keep them self-motivated. Kids finish designing and building their video game the way a racehorse chases the carrot — hungrily. When the goal is so attractive and the teaching methods so engaging, kids will have so much fun, they won’t even realize they’re learning.
Kids need to have productive screen time during the summer, and that means learning how to write code in the most relevant languages. Employers expect the people they hire to know some languages, not others. Even if a professional programmer decides to blaze their own coding trail and go it alone, some languages are more powerful and useful for certain purposes than others.
RP4K is proud to teach industry-standard coding languages, the very same ones used to program popular apps, like Netflix, or video games, like Minecraft. Here’s a list of the coding languages RP4K teaches:
Kids who know these coding languages will have a leg up when applying for jobs or taking computer classes in high school or beyond.
It’s impossible to learn coding without also learning some fundamental math concepts. Even young coders starting their programming journey learn about integers, vectors, and even trigonometry!
The co-founder and President of RP4K, Elliott Bay B.Sc. (Honours Math 1st Class) and M.Sc. (Mathematics) has always embedded core math concepts into his coding classes. RP4K’s proprietary curriculum represents Bay’s dream to expose kids to an original video game programming curriculum they’d never otherwise encounter.
Schools may have caught up over the years, introducing computer skills and coding to classrooms, but they don’t have a curriculum that revolves around teaching kids how to design and program video games.
When most people think about learning languages in school, they think about traditional spoken and written languages, like French or Spanish. They don’t tend to categorize coding languages in the same grouping, but each coding language is very much a unique language of its own.
Coding languages all have their own syntax, grammar, and rules. Multi-lingual people reportedly think differently in different languages. Coding requires a comparable shift, as students switch between different mental habits and associations.
Kids exercise the same underlying muscles required to learn other languages when they learn different coding languages.
All RP4K classes have a very low student-teacher ratio of maximum 4:1. There are never more than four students per class, and sometimes fewer. Our summer coding camp is two hours per day, Monday through Friday, meaning kids spend ample time learning essential coding skills.
Our usual classroom environment ensures each student gets their teacher’s full attention in a calm setting that promotes focus and concentration. However, the longer summer camp program gives students more time to explore and probe the coding languages under their teacher’s watchful eye.
One month of two-hour per day summer camp gives kids the same amount of class time as they’d get in months of weekly one-hour sessions. Kids can graduate from a course in a single summer when sessions are this long and deep.
Finally, learning to code involves understanding how to problem solve and think outside the box like engineers do. These positive mental habits will serve them well elsewhere in school and in life, and they come naturally to coders.
Programming involves testing hypotheses, which in turn requires kids to speculate about the correct answers and work to prove and disprove their guesses. Such an open-ended approach teaches kids two things.
First, that it’s nearly impossible to get the correct answer right away, and that making mistakes along the way is an inevitable part of getting things right. This lesson helps improve a kid’s self-esteem since it makes them more accepting of errors, seeing them as a part of the learning journey rather than something to beat themselves up over.
Second, it teaches them the stick-to-it-ness and mental resourcefulness required to solve tough problems. When kids learn to think critically and in lateral ways while developing a sense of persistence, they’ll be more well-rounded people as adults.
Summer is a magical time for kids. They should be spending time outside, running around with friends, getting dirty jumping in puddles, and other traditional summer activities. However, parents want their kids to have fun in ways that also prepare them for modern life in a technology-dominated society. Summer coding camp gives them the best of both worlds, so contact RP4K today to learn more or enroll your child in our program.
