Thanks for hunting us!
I started MV Code Club (born as "Mill Valley Code Club") because I felt like kids needed a social environment where they could make friends and work together on coding projects. I had been involved with tech startups for many years but wanted to do something that connected with the community and kids.
I have a son (age 10) and a daughter (age 8) and wanted to share the excitement of coding. Online / product-only solutions weren't exciting enough and kids quickly got bored or frustrated no matter how well designed an app or device is.
So, we started creating IRL clubs aimed at kids in 1st-8th grade. We've now got 2 clubs in Marin County (Mill Valley and Greenbrae) and one in SF (at Fort Mason). Kids join as members and come to a weekly class as well as special events and tech tours. We are also teaching in after school programs in several schools in SF. We also run girls-only sessions which are very popular.
We believe in letting kids self-direct on projects, so we have a pretty low student:instructor ratio. We track everything online and have been building our own content, IDE and systems to help kids learn to code. We've also been expanding into robotics and design as well since kids love those things.
We also make some of our curriculum (Scratch, Unity, Javascript, Arduino, etc) available at https://www.mvcodeclub.com/lessons (no login needed) so teachers, parents and kids can use it for personal use.
Happy to answer any questions!
- Doug
PS - I have a small army of kids near SF who would LOVE to tour your Bay Area startup. We've done this at awesome companies like Glassdoor and Autodesk and everyone had a blast. If you are interested in doing a tech tour, please let me know. :)
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MV Code Club