It’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog on the latest news at MV Code Club
Back in 2013, I resolved to teach my 4th grade son and 11 of his friends to code
That project was successful, and turned out to be much larger than I had expected. There was a lot of interest in our program from the local community in Mill Valley, and so I expanded it.
We rented a space in Mill Valley, and kids started to come in after school to join. Within a few months, the program was bigger than I could handle on my own, so I started hiring some people.
This wouldn’t have happened without a lot of local community support from friends, family and schools.
Since 2013, MV Code Club has expanded and we run 3 clubs in Mill Valley, Central Marin (Greenbrae) and San Francisco, CA. We also teach coding in a number of schools in San Francisco and Marin. We also run camps during the summer and school year.
Originally, when I had started, I had thought I would put the coding lessons I used onto Github I moved away from this, because github was great for hosting static content, but not as good for teaching kids to code. Being a developer, my solution was to build software to solve this problem.
So, I started working on the mvcodeclub website which would help run the program and be a place where we could host our lessons. The idea was still to keep those lessons open source, but instead of being on github, they would be stored on our website.
The website started to be focused on the clubs and programs we run with our staff, and we decided we needed to separate out the content so that it could be used by others. Our coding platform is also used by other programs, such as the iCanCode club in Rochester, NY.
So, we launched MVCode a few months ago and all of our coding courses and coding lessons are hosted there. It is designed for kids, so you don’t have to log in or create an account to view or try the lessons. We have lessons for Scratch, Javascript, Minecraft, Arduino, HTML and a variety of other platforms.
Our goal with the MVCode platform is to create a frictionless, and web-based environment that enables anyone to teach coding to kids. We believe that if we can make it easy to learn and teach coding, more people will do it and create lots of interesting lessons and projects.
If you are a teacher or are interested in learning to code, please check out MVCode and let me know what you think.