Code Ninjas, a fun and unique coding school designed to teach children ages 7-14 how to apply programming and coding to electronic applications, opened its doors to kids in Collierville last May.
Entrepreneur Brandon Aycock was inspired to open a location under the national franchise while he was living in Massachusetts. While driving to work one day, he saw another, similar program for kids, and he quickly googled it. Code Ninjas was the first result that popped up.
“That wasn’t even what I was searching for,” says Aycock. “But I started researching it, and I got in touch with the person who’s over the franchises in the United States.” He approached a former business partner, Marty Morgan, who he’d worked with at Memphis-based specialty pharmacy Accredo Health. They agreed that opening a Code Ninjas location in Collierville would be a great idea.
“What really appealed to us is the fact that Code Ninjas focuses on teaching coding, which we both thought is important [know-ledge] for kids to have,” says Aycock. “And they teach it in an engaging way.”
Considering that, according to information published on code.org, an estimated 5,000 computing jobs are currently available in Tennessee, but there are only 700 computer science graduates to fill those jobs, Aycock knew that opening a program like this in Memphis was imperative.
“We’re trying to take kids from being consumers to being producers,” Aycock says. “The goal is to prepare them for the job market of tomorrow in a fun and engaging way.” The program is designed so that students come into the karate-themed classroom, or “dojo,” to learn how to build video games, meanwhile learning coding, mathematics, logic, and problem-solving skills at their own pace.
Kids start off in the program with a white “belt,” or wristband, and as they learn, they continue to progress through each colored belt until they earn their black belt. When kids start out in the program as a white belt, they begin learning block coding. Then, they’ll move up through the yellow, orange, and green belts to learn about Javascript. Once a child earns the blue belt, they’ll learn Lua to design games like Roblox. Beyond that, students progress through purple, brown, and red belts to learn C#. Finally, to earn the black belt, students will build games for Android or Apple apps.
As students progress through each new belt, they’ll mark the occasion of their new ranking during a ceremony by chopping a rebreakable karate board and moving a magnet with their name on it up to the next level on a magnetic totem.
One student, Noel Savov, a 12-year-old 7th grade student at Mid-South Gifted Academy, has her yellow belt and is learning how to work with Java. “My favorite project was when I had to make a turtle on the screen catch raindrops,” she says. “Before I started Code Ninjas, I was interested in robots, but I wasn’t really interested in coding. But I’m really glad I did it.”
Noel says she hopes to earn her black belt in the program and that she wants to be an electrical engineer when she grows up. Her mother, Marci, has seen much progress in her daughter. “I think she’s doing really well,” says Marci. “And I think Code Ninjas does it in a way that keeps the kids engaged. From the very beginning, she’s always looking forward to going. I think that helps with making steady progress.”
Another student, Jorge Camarena Jr., a 13-year-old 7th grader at Houston Middle School, is also a yellow belt and enjoys Code Ninjas. “It’s wonderful,” he says. “I’ve had a really good experience with it. And if you just give it a lot of focus and you don’t play around, you could get things done and learn how to code easily.”
Camarena likes robotics, and his favorite project has been flying drones. He hopes to be a coder for Microsoft, Google, or Apple when he grows up.
His father, Jorge Camarena Sr., has seen a drastic improvement in his son’s abilities and says he thinks he made the right choice with Code Ninjas.
“Once he joined, I felt he was more focused on what he wants to do,” he says. “Getting to college, right now kids don’t know what they want to do. And anything you want to do these days involves a small portion of coding. So I feel like it’s an investment, and I see it as a way to the future.”
Children like Savov and Camarena work independently while they are in the dojo, but directors and senseis are there to help them along the way. “Our director and assistant director are both former teachers,” says Aycock. “Our director was a sponsor of robotics teams and taught math, and then our assistant director taught computers in high school.”
A team of 15 senseis, who are high school or college-aged kids who understand programming and/or robotics, walk around the dojo to guide students through the curriculum as needed. “We typically try to keep our sensei-student ratio at 5:1,” says Aycock.
Because the program is self-paced, children can walk in any two days of the week to fit their hour-long lessons into busy and unpredictable schedules. “We designed our hours to be flexible for the parents,” Aycock says. “Also, children are over-programmed these days with so many different options and extracurriculars.”
Aycock says he sees tremendous growth with his students, not only logically and technically, but socially and personally, as well.
“To me, the greatest success is seeing kids come out of their shells and really learning and engaging in ways that they haven’t before,” says Aycock. “We’ve had parents in other Code Ninjas centers that have been open for a while talking about how a lot of times their kids may not be the best at interacting with others. And they really have opened up in there, and it’s given them something to be proud of, where they really are able to be a leader in the class and help others.”
Anyone interested in becoming involved with Code Ninjas can visit codeninjas.com or call 901-910-6510.