Anyone have feedback for The Coder School Berkeley?

My kid has been doing camps and private lessons at the Coder School for 3 years.  He was not eager to try it, but after the free trial lesson he was hooked.  Lynna, who runs the program, is thoughtful, warm and responsive. All of the tutors have been great, many of them are CS students at Cal.  Their transition from in-person to ZOOM was pretty seamless too.  My kid asked to do the ZOOM camp again this summer, so I would call that a win, especially for a parent who has to work from home in Covid times. 

My son has been doing classes with the Coder School since they opened several years ago. He loves the classes, and all the coding instructors have been great. They have done a good job following his interests while making sure he's learning some coding. He has used Scratch, Snap, python, and javascript, and I know they have kids doing a variety of other things. He has also enjoyed their summer camps. We highly recommend the Coder School!

My daughter has been doing a weekly Code Coaching session for about six months to get support in creating Roblox games. She has both enjoyed it and made a lot of progress in her understanding of coding. They do a good job of reporting and documenting their work with her.

Our first coach changed his schedule. At that time, they gave us a choice of keeping our time with a new coach or going with a time that our current coach had available. We needed to keep our time and they did a great job in creating a very successful transition for my sensitive and slow-to-warm-up kid. 

Both of our coaches have done a great job meeting our daughter where she is at and keeping things fun while advancing her. It's been GREAT for us, particularly with fewer weekend playdates and activities that have been the scene for our last year. 

My son attended a week-long beginner coding camp during shelter-in-place. Since the camp was online, I was able to look over at my son's computer screen to see how class was going. The teacher was nice, but he went over all the coding concepts and syntax just once. I thought to myself -- there is no way beginner coding students can truly learn these concepts from being shown just once. After instruction time, the students were given a lot of time to work on their programs. My son ended up using the same 3-4 concepts over and over again in his programs for the entire week. There was no guidance from the teachers during the students' independent work time. The teachers did not encourage or challenge the kids to try new things in their programs. My son ended up learning so little coding during the camp. We don't plan on doing any more camps or classes with Coder School again.

Our daughter attended a week-long online camp last year (she was 8 1/2) and learned how to do scratch programming and we signed her up for another session this year. The camp was well staffed and well organized - they texted reminders in the morning before camp, the teachers (who appeared to be UC Berkeley students) were very pleasant and knowledgeable, and overall we felt like it was money well spent. I specifically liked that the teachers broke the kids out into small groups to do coding and were available to answer questions as the kids applied their new coding skills (they didn't say, "go do this" and then disappear). I can't say that my daughter was inspired after the camp to keep programming on her own but her dad restarted coding with her again a couple weeks ago in preparation for this year's camp and she seemed to remember what she learned.