Business Insider – Julie Bort
While other high school kids spend their weekends playing sports, video games and hanging with friends, two Silicon Valley teenagers spend their free time teaching other kids to code.
Vineet Kosaraju, a 17-year-old high school senior from Saratoga, and Nikhil Cheerla, a 16-year-old high school junior from Cupertino, have started something of a movement with their organization MathAndCoding.org.
MathAndCoding is an organization dedicated to hands-on coding classes for kids, grade school through high school, exclusively taught by other kid coders, often the kids that learned to code themselves through the program.
Since they did their first class of about 20 grade-school kids at the Mountain View, California library a year and a half ago, they have now taught 1,100 kids how to code in the Bay Area via over 200 classes taught at 18 libraries. And their students have created more than 1,600 projects, they tell Business Insider.
Going nationwide
And now, the movement is starting to go nationwide, where Kosaraju and Cheerla are teaching kids in places like Texas and North Carolina how to teach these kid coding classes, with the curriculum these two kids have created and posted to their MathAndCoding website.
“We have 31 volunteers teachers now,” Cheerla says, and about half of them are graduates from MathAndCoding classes, who then went on and studied and did more projects on their own.
It all started as more-or-less a friendly argument/challenge between the two boys, who have known each other since they were little.
Both of them learned to code in middle school, taught by their parents. All four of their parents work in the tech industry as hardware engineers. (Kosaraju’s dad and Cheerla’s mom used to work for the same big tech company. That’s how they became family friends).
They were discussing that these days “people learn programming without the support of other people. They learn a bunch of stuff online at sites like Kahn Academy and Codeacademy,” Kosaraju tells us.
Cheerla believed that online learning was just as good as the taught-by-a-parent method. Kosaraju was less sure. So they spent an evening doing a bunch of coding classes atCode.org and concluded they were both right … and both wrong.
It was pretty easy to learn coding online, especially if you already had some skills. But there was also something to be said for having a support group, people to talk to about your project in person, ask questions and just help you get started.
So, they decided to do something about it. They called various nearby libraries to see who would let them teach a class to kids. Only one said yes, in the city of Mountain View.
by MindMake via MindMake Blog
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