Code Camp to graduate with HP’s help

Three years ago, Code Camp started with just eight students. This year it will reach 18,000 students, employ 22 staff, and more than 1000 paid tutors. With HP’s help, it aims to get to 200,000 students by 2020.

iTWire interviewed its co-founders Pete Neill and Benjamin Levi, and Paul Gracey, Director HP Personal Systems South Pacific on what HP’s support means to the future of Australian kids learning to code.

Neill said, “We want to create a generation of kids who can become Elon Musks [referring to the serial entrepreneur, lateral thinker, and founder of Tesla and Space X]. We are focusing on primary school children because they get very inspired, especially the girls when they cut some code that works.”

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We joked that Code Camp was a far friendlier name than STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). Levi agreed, “We are aiming at younger children who don’t care about things like syntactical code – we help them learn the logic behind what they want to achieve through an in-house developed, drag and drop tool based on JavaScript. We focus on the outcomes until they are ready to take the training wheels off.”

Neill said that Code Camp had been amazingly well received growing from Fishburners (a co-working space in Sydney) to providing Australia wide training after school, during school holidays, in-school, incursions, and co-facilitating. “Many of our tutors are teachers and some of the students who come back to code camps will become tutors too. Our eventual aim is to equip teachers with the skills so that Code Camp becomes part of the curriculum.”

Levi said, “This is a real self-generating movement but we are aware that Code Camp must remain authentic. The kids want more and more including on-going engagement, emails, challenges and inspiration to achieve more. We are thinking of a Hero’s Code Camp for the advanced ones and we think that future iterations of Code Camp will start to cover server side issues, website design courses, VR, 3D and more. We just did not know how to scale Code Camp until we met HP and Paul Gracey.”

The in-house developed apps and support materials were all run on a house server – now with the rapid expansion, they have moved to Amazon Web Services cloud.

Gracey said that he had become aware of Code Camp HP’s employees whose children had attended Code Camps. “It sounded like a great idea and even more a great cultural fit for the “new” HP,” he said.

Through the collaboration, HP will support Code Camp across the country, starting with:

• HP have provided Code Camp with technology, including HP Streams and Commercial grade technology to enable the company to scale to reach the collective goal of 200,000 students by 2020.
• Code Camp will be joining HP at EduTECH, the largest education event in Asia Pacific, to drive a deeper dialogue with educators on its Professional Development and Coding programs, combined with HP’s education-focused technology solutions, such as HP Streams and Sprout by HP.
• HP are integrating Code Camp into its education partner ecosystem and HP’s Education Excellence initiatives.
• Code Camp will conduct its teacher-focused Professional Development sessions at HP’s Customer Welcome Centres (Sydney and Melbourne).
• Code Camp will leverage HP’s Learning Labs research data from around Australia and tap into its education insights from around the globe.
• Code Camp will join HP with its nationwide Lighthouse Case Study programs, garnering insights directly from students, principals, and teachers.
• Together, Code Camp and HP will leverage and promote existing industry cyber safety tips from MacAfee and develop new material to encourage kids to be creators in a safe environment.

“HP is here to help lower the barriers to entry and achieve those 200,000 kids by 2020. This program and the investment is not something we take lightly and we are here for the long-haul – it is a very long game and HP staff are enthusiastic to help. We will translate that desire to our reseller network,” he said.

We focused on Code Camp removing barriers to children learning to code. Neill said that Code Camp had almost achieved a 50/50 gender diversity and it was proactively helping female teachers to tutor at Code Camp. “Once a girl sees a female teacher doing this the stereotype of computer nerd boys disappears.”

Levi summed up, “This is the new Australia, one where we question what could be and say let’s just do it. That would not be possible without the immense help and long term support of HP. It is amazing just how flexible they are and how much value they bring to the collaboration.”

L-R: Peter Neill, Hayley Markham, Ben Levi, and Paul Gracey (HP)