Carry on camping
- Article 15 of 15
- EducationInvestor, May 2015
Coder camps are a red hot ed tech trend in the US and catching on fast in Europe. Investors are now taking a closer look, finds Rob Buckley
The new billionaires are tech billionaires, whether it's the 'old' guard like Microsoft's Bill Gates or young upstarts like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. Almost all of them made their money from computers, or more specifically the programming of computers. Moreover, as developed economies have shifted away from manufacturing and towards knowledge- and service-based industries, firms such as theirs have become key to wealth generation.
However, finding the people with the necessary skills to start, manage and work in these companies is an issue. For example, the EU is predicting that this year, it will face a shortfall of one million technical workers, and it's far from alone. No wonder then that governments around the world are looking to ensure that the next generation of coders is being trained in the skills they need to be the next Markus "Minecraft" Persson (or one of the many people employed by such an individual).
In the UK, widely perceived to be one of the frontrunners in addressing the issue, the government has modified the National Curriculum to substantially boost the teaching of computer programming. Since September last year, Key Stage 3 pupils (11-14 year olds) must be taught to "use two or more programming languages, at least one of which is textual, to solve a variety of computational problems".
Having this requirement and meeting it are two different things, however. "So many teachers, particularly in the primary sector are quite unprepared to teach this curriculum," says David Miller, a former Guardian/Pearson Teacher of the Year and now Kuato Studios' director of learning.
As a result, some in the UK and elsewhere aren't convinced that schools will be able to impart enough knowledge and are turning to alternatives. One in particular is now gaining a lot of traction: the coding 'boot camp'. This is not a new idea for adults, with the 'Microsoft boot camp' being a well-known, intensive way to acquire certification in that company's technologies in a short space of time. But the move to offer them to children and teenagers is more novel.
Naturally, the first organisations to offer coding boot camps were in the US, where the idea of parents sending their children away to camps during the holidays, sometimes for months at a time, is well embedded. While these camps typically involve outdoor and social activities, sub-varieties dedicated to learning have sprung up, and between 40,000 and 50,000 children now go to technology camps annually.
Founded in 1999, iD Tech dominates the market and today turns over tens of millions of dollars. It runs summer camps for seven to 18-year olds, teaching them how to develop a new app or video game in industry-standard programming languages including Java and C++.
But the coding boot camp for kids has been adopted in other countries, too. In Nigeria, for example, Audax Solution offers five-day children's camps in the Scratch programming language, as well as web technologies HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Managing director Emeka Onyenwe says: "One of the cardinal objectives of the Code Club is to arouse the interest of these children, to imbibe the spirit of coding, which is an important skill, especially now that the world is living in a digital age. It is not enough for children to know how to use technology - they should also understand how these technologies work."
In the UK, there are now many organisations offering coding camps, some inspired by the American model. Jill Hodges sent her own children to a coding boot camp when they lived in the US, but struggled to find anything similar when they moved to the UK 20 years ago. To continue kindling their enthusiasm, she decided to found Fire Tech Camp, initially self-funding it before securing investment from parents to develop it further. The firm commands fees of up to £1,000 for five-day long camps during half-term and the summer holidays, which are run at Fire Tech Camp's own premises as well as at independent schools and universities.
"We cover as much in a week as in a year at school," says Hodges. "Kids are self-selected so they're motivated." Such is their motivation that she's started offering residential camps as well as day camps to cope with demand, particularly from overseas, and is looking for partners.
Not all camps charge attendees. CoderDojo, a network of more than 660 free, volunteer-run computer clubs or 'dojos' in 58 countries around the world offers shorter weekend courses gratis, collectively catering to more than 25,000 children every weekend. The organisation plans to grow this number to 100,000 over the next 18 months.
Co-founder Bill Liao, a venture capitalist by trade, regards children's coding camps as perhaps the most important investment tech VCs can make - in both their own and the community's interests. "I look at it as a triple bottom line play. We're going to run out of programmers in the world soon. People talk about the need for fracking because we're reaching 'peak oil', but 'peak code' is long past. Already, my number one cause for rejecting start ups that come to me for funding is that they have no engineers of their own," he says. Outsourcing coding to India doesn't work well, he adds, as to design good software requires constant iteration, something a different time zone makes "incredibly painful". "If that's their plan, I tell them to go away - literally 10 times a day."
The pay-off might seem initially to be long-term. However, with children entering dojos when they're as young as five, CoderDojo can already point to 12 year-old graduates of its camps that have started successful businesses based on the skills they've learned.
Liao works particularly hard to ensure girls attend - after all, ignoring half the population will only double future recruitment problems. He says that describing coding as 'creative' and getting popular girls to attend dojos goes a long way to balancing the genders, as does applying more practical and less theoretical teaching approaches. Kuato Studios' David Miller corroborates this.
The company, which is backed by Horizon Ventures and SRI International, uses JavaScript gaming to enthuse children about programming as "the feeling was that coding in schools was quite conventional and all about completing the next test, not learning the way it happens in real life". "We run boot camps in girls' schools and what we've discovered is that girls like the strategic aspects of the games. They like working out the most economic way of coding."
It's an issue that Sheineez Barber, one of the founding partners of FunTech, is keen to address too. Her company offers week-long coding boot camps, normally held in independent schools and on university campuses in the UK, attended by children from all over Europe. This year, Barber is launching several girls-only camps in the hope that they will convince more girls to attend. "In a good year we may have 15-20% girls. Once the girls are in, they're fine and hold their own, but at the moment, they don't connect with it."
Barber also does her best to ensure that those with special educational needs (SEN) are able to attend. That includes those with autistic spectrum disorders, whom tech firms go to special lengths to recruit in later life for their unique talents. With a typical student-to-teacher ratio of around one to eight, camps may be better suited to SEN learning than many mainstream schools, too.
Since Barber founded the company in 1996 with her own money, it has grown organically without the need for additional investment. But this summer she expects to see twice as much as growth as last year and wants to capitalise on that, potentially with the help of an external investor.
Barber isn't alone in seeing a burst in growth recently. "We've definitely noticed a big increase in interest in our events over the last year or so, both from parents and also from business - we've seen double the numbers coming through our door," says Tech Camp director Tom Ward. "Until last year, I wasn't getting much more than what a normal teacher would get as a salary, but over the last year, profits have taken off."
In the past few months, he has also garnered attention from potential investors. He says he was approached by a VC firm interested in investing in a sustainable business that gives back to the community. "They obviously also see it as a potentially profitable industry and an explosive growth field, and in the UK, there aren't many other companies doing this compared with the States." Ward even hears whispers that iD Tech is "sniffing around at the moment" for possible investment opportunities.
An ascendant industry, an undersupplied market and companies ripe for investment - it's practically an investor's dream. And as CoderDojo's Bill Liao says, there's a moral imperative to get involved: without more support for children's coding camps, the economy could suffer and "all other investments will become meaningless".