Coding is a valuable skill, for both adults and children alike. As the future web designers and developers of the world, gaining valuable programming skills at a young age will build coding confidence and set children up for future success.
CodeMonkey has committed to teaching our little future programmers the basics and beyond with their specially crafted coding courses just for kids.
The Beginning of CodeMonkey
We caught up with CodeMonkey CEO and co-founder, Jonathan Schor, to learn more about his revolutionary concept. He told us “CodeMonkey was established in 2014, during an accelerator program that my fellow co-founders and I took part in. The idea for CodeMonkey came to me years earlier though as I was volunteering with young children.
I decided to create CodeMonkey because of the success I saw while I was teaching. I really cherished the time I spent with the kids and the happiness I saw on them when they succeeded in learning new coding concepts. This impact has stuck with me and I felt I had a good chance of creating something that would reach more students on a global level through an established technology”.
What Are CodeMonkey’s Core Strengths?
Aside from the obvious benefits of kids learning a brand new skill, Code Monkey has lots of things to offer children, parents, and teachers. Their award-winning programming courses will teach children:
- Creativity
- Algorithmic thinking
- Problem-solving skills
- Text-based coding
- Computational thinking
Children will learn to “code like a real developer” with professional and fun game-building courses and activities. They describe their courses as “coding adventures”. And, most plans include over 400 coding challenges for your children to demonstrate their skills.
In relation to CodeMonkey’s core strengths, Jonathan had this to say; “CodeMonkey is special in that it captures and maintains student attention levels with its engaging storyline and gamified interface. All of our courses are different from one another and support teachers along the way. Other than unique content that’s exciting for students, CodeMonkey really works! Teachers can easily implement it in the classroom and track student progress”.
We think this is a fantastic way to teach children the valuable skill of programming.
What Kind of Activities Can Your Kids Work On?
Children learn more when they’re taught in fun way. John told us “I realized that the kids grasped the concepts much faster when I taught them in a gamified manner. That was when the idea for coding puzzles emerged and the idea stuck with me until the market was ready for game-based content tailored to teach kids coding”.
The child-focused website has a diverse range of activities suitable for all ages and abilities. Code chatbots, build games, learn maths, and have a coding adventure! CodeMonkey offers all these and more!
Working With Schools and Parents Worldwide
CodeMonkey is available for kids to utilise all over the world. This has been an important factor for Jonathan while building his business. He wanted to give children all over the world the opportunity to learn programming for themselves; “The need and demand for CodeMonkey in different parts of the world has always been very exciting but without our partners, we would not have been able to deliver to these communities in such a short amount of time. They know the local customs, language and needs so together with our content, they were able to help make CodeMonkey more accessible”.
How Much Does CodeMonkey Cost?
CodeMonkey has two categories of plans, plus an option to create a bespoke plan. The prices are very competitive, making the courses and activities all-the-more accessible for everyone.
The categories are:
Teachers
- Home School – For private tutors and smaller groups – $109 per year
- School – For schools and teachers – Price based on a custom plan
- Super Teacher – For larger groups – $49 per year
Teachers are given their own dashboard, lesson plans, and online support.
Parents
The parent plans are a little different than the teacher plans. You save money by committing to a longer subscription. Take a look:
- Billed Annually – $4.95 per month
- Billed Quarterly – $7.45 per month
- Billed Monthly – $9.95 per month
Each parent plan includes 35 platformer exercises, over 90 game-creation tasks, more than 70 python exercises, over 50 maths challenges, and much more. You get one child account and access to future releases.
Continuing to Develop New Courses and Tools
As a programming course provider, it’s vital that CodeMonkey stays up-to-date and relevant to new coding concepts. Naturally, Jonathan is way ahead of us here; “We are developing more courses and features to help students learn more coding languages and for teachers to feel empowered to teach a subject they may have no previous experience in. This year we created features such as CodeMonkey Lessons that really sky-rocketed the teaching process and we will continue developing such tools”.
What Are Jonathan’s Goals for CodeMonkey?
Jonathan has a firm understanding of the huge potential his courses offer children. He told us “The CodeMonkey platform will foster learners and help them forge their career paths. The gap between the number of computing jobs and CS students is increasing. Per a Code.org study, by 2020, there will be 1,000,000 more computing jobs than computer science students. We see this gap as an opportunity for students to acquire high-demand job skills on CodeMonkey.com and enable better career options for them in the future!”
Jonathan continued “Ultimately, I want CodeMonkey to walk students through every aspect of their Computer Science education, from schooling to their career. I would like for students to be able to turn to CodeMonkey for everything from learning how to write their first lines of code all the way to preparing for their first interview as a developer”.
CodeMonkey is a fantastic concept and a brilliant opportunity for children to learn real programming skills in a fun way. We think the team behind CodeMonkey are doing a great job at providing coding education to those that will benefit from it in the future. We wish Jonathan and his team very good luck moving forward.
