What is Coding NP?
Coding NP is a registered 501(c)3 non profit. Or EIN# is 88-3691784. All donations are tax deductible.
Coding NP’s mission is to correct the gender imbalance in the tech industry over the long term, by getting more girls started in coding at a young age; and to support working families with high quality afterschool educational child care.
Our afterschool coding classes are inclusive and friendly to all genders. As our students age, they carry these early memories of coding together with them. Over time, this will shift the current gender imbalance in high school STEM classes and the workplace.
With your support, we are slowly changing the world, starting in Seattle, focusing on kids. Our teaching goal is to be the very best IN THE WORLD at teaching young kids to learn how to code.
Coding NP was started by longtime friends and supporters of Eric Fredrickson’s mission driven “for profit/no profit” company, CreativeCoding.com, which he started in 2013 with the then-radical approach of teaching kids to code by helping them write their own video games. They formed the nonprofit Coding NP and then hired him and his entire staff away from Creative Coding.
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Our Seattle-based team puts quality and mission over everything else. We like it that way, and so do our kids and parents.
“Founder Dad” Eric Fredrickson developed The Creative Coding Method to teach and inspire kids in this age group through these core principles.
- A friendly, safe environment for all genders. Girls and Boys and every variation on the gender spectrum must feel welcome and safe. It’s been the core of our training from the very beginning. Everything starts with kids feeling safe and being kind to each other.
- Fun! The most important thing for success is to make sure the kids are having fun. This keeps them fully engaged with their own creative project. We celebrate successes AND mistakes, and cheer each other on. It’s all a part of their coding adventure. If they’re having fun as they create, we literally cannot stop them from learning!
- Creativity. Every child has ideas. Our approach teaches coding like a box of crayons. Look at all these great tools! What can you make with them? Let’s try some stuff and find out! Once they’re excited about their idea, we help them bring it to life. No assignment we could give them will ever be more exciting than your child’s own ideas. It’s harder to teach this way, but better for your child. Project-based learning WORKS. Coding, like language, does NOT have to be learned sequentially. We take advantage of that. So every session is a journey of discovery, led by your child’s own curiosity & ideas.
- Teaching Kids to Teach Themselves. Our teachers are trained to see non-verbal signs of frustration. (this works, even over Zoom. We make “Cameras on” a requirement) Our teachers are trained to ask questions and give hints, avoiding direct answers as much as possible, so your child learns the “real coding” process that all professional coders would recognize: We guess and try things and debug *lots of debugging!* until the code finally works. It’s a little bit frustrating at times, but that’s they key to unlocking that feeling of ELATION when they finally get it working! Teaching your child to teach themselves takes time. Sometimes it takes a year or even two, before they gain enough confidence to fail boldly, knowing they can recover and untangle even the worst bugs. Others may get there in a few weeks, then have a setback. Few people learn “in a straight line” but each student gets there in the end. The goal is always self-sufficient learning. Once kids truly realize they CAN learn on their own, the entire universe of coding languages is open to them. Because they same method they’ve learned to master coding in Scratch, will work in java, python, or any new language that comes along.
- Persistence. It turns out that Coding a game is perhaps the best tool for teaching the most valuable skill of all: Persistence. The visual rewards are so great when something works, and at first we make it pretty easy for then. But soon they realize that Coding is hard. So then they have to work again, before feeling that joy and elation they crave from success. Coding for kids is a rapid, iterative cycle of emotion, and that’s they key to teaching persistence. Your child will fail before they succeed – but it feels incredible when do succeed! So then they want to try again, something a little more challenging. Our teachers give students guidance during this emotional cycle and help them navigate those emotional barriers. Our goal is that your kids learn to get excited about facing a tough problem because they’ve developed that taste for success and learned to associate the arrival of a challenge with the imminent feeling of success that is just on the other side of that challenge. And what a valuable lesson that is. In fact, persistence is actually the most important thing we teach. Coding their own games is like controlling their own destiny. And that’s why coding just happens to be the perfect vehicle for your child to learn this all-important life skill.
As a new non-profit, this entity has no financial ties to creativecoding.com or its parent LLC. but we acknowledge the legacy of service that it represents with this historical photo from the original creativecoding4kids website, and his story.
Our Story…
It’s hard to believe now, but in May 2013 when I looked for classes for my daughter to learn coding, I found only 1 company who offered classes for kids her age (8 at the time), and ALL their teachers were men. Also, nearly all their students were boys.
I started teaching her to code, by helping her write a simple animation based on her idea, which was of a cute squirrel popping up to say hi, then collecting nuts falling from a tree. We had so much fun, I decided to offer a class to her girl scout troop. At a meeting with one of the other moms to discuss logistics, she said, “what about my sons? You should make this a summer camp, and open it up to everybody!” So that it what I did.
In May of 2013. I put up a website, explained my philosophy, and emailed all my friends who had kids. Most of those friends were from the tech industry, and knew the value of coding firsthand. They invited other friends, and the response after the first few camps was overwhelming, because the kids had so much fun AND learned so much. At the end of that first summer, I knew I’d found my calling: teaching kids to code by helping them write their own games.
Teaching coding this way was a new, radical approach at the time, but in the decade since, it’s become the industry standard.
In Fall of 2013, I taught my first after school classes at Thornton Creek and Lincoln Elementary. There were a hit! Soon I had to hire and train new teachers to keep up with the demand as we expanded over the years from 2 to over 30 elementary schools!
But, something always bothered me, and that was that we could only afford to serve schools where the parents could pay the fees we needed to charge to pay our teachers. We need to pay our teachers more than typical after school programs, because after we teach our teachers to code, they can go off and get coding jobs with tech companies! So we were always limited in what scholarships we could offer. We have managed to support 2 “title 1” schools (schools with more than 50% of kids on free or reduced lunches because of poverty), with lower priced classes where we run an ongoing loss, using income from the full-price schools to support it, but we were limited in what we could sustain, as a mission-driven “for profit” that never made much profit.
The answer came gradually over 2 years as we went through the pandemic, which was a tough time for everybody. Some advice from friends and customer parents who’d launched their own charities was incredibly helpful. A lot of time was spent with lawyers making sure there was no financial or legal connection between the old company and the new nonprofit. At the end, I got a job offer from the new non-profit to do what I love, teach coding to kids.
I’m proud to lead this team and serve this community through Coding NP.
The goal over the next two years is to expand, to preserve the entire School District, including those schools that have been hysterically disadvantaged and unable to afford these kinds of small, high quality coding classes. after school.
If you’d like to help, you can support our teachers in several ways. The easiest is just to pay full price for our classes. The next is to reach out to us to discuss a donation or ongoing support.
We have had a policy since the beginning: We never turn a kid away, and if they can’t afford our classes, it’s “pay what you can.”
Because most of the schools we serve are in wealthy areas, we have been able to subsidize several schools with lower incomes, where most of the kids live below the poverty line. We’ve been teaching the same quality classes there with some teachers, just at a lower price and with significant scholarships.
As a “business”, this was never really sustainable. We were limited in how many people we could help, and sometimes there was no money left for my own family, or we had to actually supplement the company to make payroll.
Then, in the pandemic, we almost had to shut everything down, which would have been a tragedy. But, thanks to our loyal parents and kid customers, and zoom, we survived. Smaller, but wiser.
The answer, of course, was to become a nonprofit, so we could accept donations and grants and expand our mission, not shrink it.
With the help of a few good-hearted friends and wise guidance of some of our customers, that’s what we’ve done. And I couldn’t be more excited about how many more kids were going to be able to help this year and in the future.
In the meantime, if you’d like to know more, or you’re a great marketing mom or dad and you’d like to help, just email us at parentsupport@codingnp.org.
A real, live human will respond.
Yeah, we still work that way. Even though we’re totally playing with AI tools like everybody. We are coders, after all. These tools are pretty sweet!
Our Social Mission
Correct the gender imbalance in the tech industry the long, slow, sure way: By teaching kids from a young age to code, with all-gender classes, so ALL kids grow up knowing that coding, (and technology, and math) is for *everyone*. By normalizing this world in their childhood, they change the world each year, as they grow up.
10 years on: Yep. This works.
What we’ve seen over the last 10 years is that our initial thesis was correct. This works. They key is to create that environment which supports and is friendly to all genders. As they get older, kids carry this reality with them into middle school, then high school, and beyond. Thankfully, we’re not the only ones working on this problem, and progress is being made. In terms of our own impact, what we can measure directly is what happens in the middle and high schools that our elementary school students end up in. In those schools, teachers report a surprising and sustaining increase in young women in their computer science electives. And just as importantly, the young men in these classes are not alarmed by this. There’s less bullying or feeling threatened, because they all grew up coding together in our after-school classes. This is normal. The girls grew up thinking of themselves as coders, as tech-savvy as anyone, and the boys grew up knowing that when they get stuck with a tough coding bug, their best bet is to ask the girl next to them for help.
The future
I have long wished that we could expand this program to ALL elementary schools. This new nonprofit is the key to starting to make that wish come true! Read on for more details.
The Problem: Gender imbalance and Gender Bias in the tech industry.
With the enthusiastic support of key people at the district, we’re going to do our part to address the “opportunity gap” by offering our after school classes in places where nothing like them exists, and where “pay what you can” seems like a dream.
It’s going to be great.
It’s going to be challenging.
There are transportation challenges, hiring and training challenges, cultural challenges, and problems that we’ll learn about along the way.
But the good news is, we’ve got grit. And persistence. And the support of one of the most well educated and most generous hearted cities in America.
We’ll start with Seattle. In 2 years we’ll double in size twice, until we serve the entire district, or close enough.
Then, we’ll have a model for other school districts in other cities, and we’ll go there too.
There is precedent for this. Look how much code.org has accomplished, and girls who code, both wonderful organizations started by wonderful people who do great things.
We’ll stay focused on what we do best, what we in fact do better than anyone else in the world, in my not so humble opinion: teach coding to grade school aged kids.
We’ll stick to our core belief that this is the golden window for teaching grit using this method, That starting with kids is the key to correct the the gender imbalance in the tech industry, and that our role is to stick to our multi-gender approach, while leaving the excellent girls who code to offer equally valuable all girls classes to those who’d best benefit from that environment.
We hope you will offer your support. Every contribution, large or small, will help change the world for one child or a million.
We accept all kinds of donations, from money to domain names to zebras. Ok, no zebras. just checking that you haven’t zoned out.
We’re a small team, just getting started, and we’re humble enough to know we are surrounded by a lot of people who know how to do this better than we do. One thing’s for sure.. we’ll do our best!
Thank you in advance for your support!
Eric Fredrickson
Executive Director, CodingNP.org
Other things I’m proud of starting:
founder, CreativeCoding.com
Founding committee member, Troop681.org
Co-Founder, Postcardly.com
early employee and IT supervisor, Western Wireless/Voicestream/T-Mobile
former Director of Development, Marketing, Tenzing.com “First to put Wi-Fi on commercial airplanes” 🙂