Our classes are self-paced, allowing students to progress through our curriculum at their own speed.
Project Based Learning
In our classrooms, students learn entirely through creating projects. Projects allow students to work on their critical thinking and problem solving skills while simultaneously picking up the hard skills of coding.
Students create games in Scratch, progress to websites in HTML, CSS, and Javascript, as well as work in many other tools and languages depending on what keeps them both engaged and challenged. They create projects not by using tutorials, but rather by learning to think critically and create their own solutions to problems.
In addition to students being able to construct their own knowledge, project based curriculum also allows students to work at their own pace. It is the job of our teachers to make sure that students find projects that are both engaging and challenging at the same time.
Challenge Projects
Challenge Projects are at the core of the The Coding Space education. Projects are fun and engaging games, websites, or apps that students are challenged to figure out how to build.
Unlike virtually all other coding curriculums, The Coding Space doesn’t have follow-along tutorials. In fact, Challenge Projects are “un-tutorials.” They are similar to tutorials in that they guide students in building something, except at The Coding Space we don’t include any of the actual instructions on how to do anything.
Challenge Projects list the high-level tasks students need to complete the project, but leave out how to do them. Students figure out the rest via tinkering, Googling, asking a friend, and iterating towards a solution, all while developing deep insights and intuition of high-level concepts.
Expert Mentorship
Fostering non-cognitive skills, like grit and intellectual self-confidence is a delicate balance of targeted encouragement and tough love.
Our teachers are highly trained mentors that are skilled in knowing exactly how much help to give a student, when, and how often. Rather than simply giving hints or answers, The Coding Space instructors draw ideas from students through leading questions and modeling strategies on how they could find answers for themselves. Would Google be helpful in this scenario? What keywords would you use?
Beginner Classes
(Co-ed & GirlCode)
Coding with Scratch. Skills Covered:



What Will My Child Learn First?
The cornerstone of our curriculum begins with block-based programming in MIT Scratch. The advantage of block-based programming is that students don’t have to worry about small syntactic details on Day 1.
Parents often worry that because block-based programming is quicker to start coding, it is less educational than text-based programming. It’s actually the opposite! Learning the syntax of a programming language is a tedious and rote task that doesn’t engage students’ critical thinking. Block-based programming skips directly to the difficult part of coding: formulating one’s ideas into a logical sequence of steps.
Starting with a text-based programming language is like teaching a child to write before they can speak or to spell words in a foreign language before they know what they mean! We believe that meaning comes first, and spelling second.
Advanced Classes
(Co-ed, GirlCode, & High School)
Coding with WoofJS, HTML, CSS, or Javascript.
Skills Covered in WoofJS:
- Syntax
Woof provides a transition between Scratch and Javascript,
allowing students to practice with text-based syntax - Array
An array lets you store multiple values in a single variable. - Functions
A “subprogram” that can be called by code.
What Happens After Scratch?
Our team at The Coding Space has spent thousands of hours creating the best possible solution to this answer. We developed WoofJS as an intermediate step where kids could go after Scratch. The idea was to allow students to leverage their existing Scratch knowledge but while using a web programming language. For every block in Scratch, we created an equivalent text-based command in JavaScript. WoofJS allows students to leverage their Scratch knowledge to learn JavaScript syntax.
WoofJS makes the transition as seamless as possible. There are no new concepts to learn. Students simply take what they know from Scratch and learn how to type it. This is the correct ordering of things: learning to speak before learning to spell. WoofJS is focused on the spelling.
What is WoofJS?
WoofJS is a JavaScript framework. In programming, a “framework” is a suite of functionality that can be added to a language. For example, Rails is a popular web framework for the Ruby programming language.
Programming in WoofJS is programming in JavaScript with some special words thrown in. It’s similar to how when you speak about baseball, it’s ultimately English just with some additional words, such as “home run”, “batting average”, and “strike out”. In the case of WoofJS, the additional words come directly from Scratch. For example, in Scratch there’s a block called “forever” which creates a loop that runs 30 times per second (which is about how fast the human eye perceives motion), so WoofJS adds a command to JavaScript called “forever” with the same functionality. Without WoofJS, this would still be possible, but it has a different name: “setInterval”. One of the beauties of WoofJS is that it keeps as much about Scratch constant so students can focus on learning JavaScript syntax, including common difficulties such as matching parentheses and brackets, indenting their code, and creating functions and variables.
What is after WoofJS?
In our Advanced Classes, students can explore their creativity through coding. They can choose to use our Frontend curriculum, or explore Backend and iOS Development.
They can learn to build web-apps like a to-do list, a calculator, a Buzzfeed-style quiz, and a Giphy Search Engine.
Skills Covered in HTML, CSS, Javascript:
- HTML Tags
Hidden keywords within a web page that define how the
browser must format and display the content. - AJAX Requests
Send data to and retrieve from a server asynchronously
without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. - DOM
When a web page is loaded, the browser creates a Document Object Model
of the page. The HTML DOM model is constructed as a tree of Objects
Our classes are self-paced, allowing students to progress through our curriculum at their own speed.
Project Based Learning
In our classrooms, students learn entirely through creating projects. Projects allow students to work on their critical thinking and problem solving skills while simultaneously picking up the hard skills of coding.
Students create games in Scratch, progress to websites in HTML, CSS, and Javascript, as well as work in many other tools and languages depending on what keeps them both engaged and challenged. They create projects not by using tutorials, but rather by learning to think critically and create their own solutions to problems.
In addition to students being able to construct their own knowledge, project based curriculum also allows students to work at their own pace. It is the job of our teachers to make sure that students find projects that are both engaging and challenging at the same time.
Challenge Projects
Challenge Projects are at the core of the The Coding Space education. Projects are fun and engaging games, websites, or apps that students are challenged to figure out how to build.
Unlike virtually all other coding curriculums, The Coding Space doesn’t have follow-along tutorials. In fact, Challenge Projects are “un-tutorials.” They are similar to tutorials in that they guide students in building something, except at The Coding Space we don’t include any of the actual instructions on how to do anything.
Challenge Projects list the high-level tasks students need to complete the project, but leave out how to do them. Students figure out the rest via tinkering, Googling, asking a friend, and iterating towards a solution, all while developing deep insights and intuition of high-level concepts.
Expert Mentorship
Fostering non-cognitive skills, like grit and intellectual self-confidence is a delicate balance of targeted encouragement and tough love.
Our teachers are highly trained mentors that are skilled in knowing exactly how much help to give a student, when, and how often. Rather than simply giving hints or answers, The Coding Space instructors draw ideas from students through leading questions and modeling strategies on how they could find answers for themselves. Would Google be helpful in this scenario? What keywords would you use?
Beginner Classes
(Co-ed & GirlCode)
Coding with Scratch. Skills Covered:



What Will My Child Learn First?
The cornerstone of our curriculum begins with block-based programming in MIT Scratch. The advantage of block-based programming is that students don’t have to worry about small syntactic details on Day 1.
Parents often worry that because block-based programming is quicker to start coding, it is less educational than text-based programming. It’s actually the opposite! Learning the syntax of a programming language is a tedious and rote task that doesn’t engage students’ critical thinking. Block-based programming skips directly to the difficult part of coding: formulating one’s ideas into a logical sequence of steps.
Starting with a text-based programming language is like teaching a child to write before they can speak or to spell words in a foreign language before they know what they mean! We believe that meaning comes first, and spelling second.
Advanced Classes
(Co-ed, GirlCode, & High School)
Coding with WoofJS, HTML, CSS, or Javascript.
Skills Covered in WoofJS:
- Syntax
Woof provides a transition between Scratch and Javascript, allowing students to practice with text-based syntax - Array
An array lets you store multiple values in a single variable. - Functions
A “subprogram” that can be called by code.
What Happens After Scratch?
Our team at The Coding Space has spent thousands of hours creating the best possible solution to this answer. We developed WoofJS as an intermediate step where kids could go after Scratch. The idea was to allow students to leverage their existing Scratch knowledge but while using a web programming language. For every block in Scratch, we created an equivalent text-based command in JavaScript. WoofJS allows students to leverage their Scratch knowledge to learn JavaScript syntax.
WoofJS makes the transition as seamless as possible. There are no new concepts to learn. Students simply take what they know from Scratch and learn how to type it. This is the correct ordering of things: learning to speak before learning to spell. WoofJS is focused on the spelling.
What is WoofJS?
WoofJS is a JavaScript framework. In programming, a “framework” is a suite of functionality that can be added to a language. For example, Rails is a popular web framework for the Ruby programming language.
Programming in WoofJS is programming in JavaScript with some special words thrown in. It’s similar to how when you speak about baseball, it’s ultimately English just with some additional words, such as “home run”, “batting average”, and “strike out”. In the case of WoofJS, the additional words come directly from Scratch. For example, in Scratch there’s a block called “forever” which creates a loop that runs 30 times per second (which is about how fast the human eye perceives motion), so WoofJS adds a command to JavaScript called “forever” with the same functionality. Without WoofJS, this would still be possible, but it has a different name: “setInterval”. One of the beauties of WoofJS is that it keeps as much about Scratch constant so students can focus on learning JavaScript syntax, including common difficulties such as matching parentheses and brackets, indenting their code, and creating functions and variables.
What is after WoofJS?
In our Advanced Classes, students can explore their creativity through coding. They can choose to use our Frontend curriculum, or explore Backend and iOS Development.
They can learn to build web-apps like a to-do list, a caclulator, a Buzzfeed-style quiz, and a Giphy Search Engine.
Skills Covered in HTML, CSS, Javascript:
- HTML Tags
Hidden keywords within a web page that define how the browser must format and display the content. - AJAX Requests
Send data to and retrieve from a server asynchronously without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. - DOM
When a web page is loaded, the browser creates a Document Object Model of the page. The HTML DOM model is constructed as a tree of Objects
Do you teach Processing?
How is Java similar to JavaScript?
When will my child learn ‘real’ programming?
Fortunately, there is a simple criteria to determine if something is a ‘real’ programming language. A programming language is ‘Turing Complete’ if it can simulate any other programming language. At The Coding Space, we teach two Turing Complete programming languages: Scratch and JavaScript, and two non-Turing Complete languages: HTML and CSS.
In other words, Scratch is real programming. It has variables, loops, boolean logic, objects, message-passing, conditional branching, etc. What Seymour Papert said about Logo is true about Scratch: "Logo has often been described as a language for children. It is so, but in the same sense that English is a language for children, a sense that does not preclude its being also a language for poets, scientists, and philosophers."
We strongly believe that programmers of all ages benefit from starting in a block-based programming environment like Scratch. However, because of its seemingly childish nature, students often want to move to text-based programming way before they’ve exhausted what they can learn in Scratch. While we do encourage students to stick with Scratch as long as possible, we don’t hold kids back if they want to switch to text-based programming. As often as not, students realize text-based programming isn’t as fun as they expected and switch right back to Scratch, wisely leaving text-based programming for another day.
While Scratch is a real programming language, it doesn’t have nearly as many features as JavaScript, HTML and CSS. When a student’s Scratch projects gets beyond a couple hundred blocks of code, it’s about time to move to JavaScript. There they can learn to use arrays, functions that return values, first-class functions, variable scoping, functional programming principles, and much more.
Students’ transitions from Scratch to JavaScript with the WoofJS JavaScript framework, where they can continue programming with one foot in the familiar world of Scratch concepts and one foot in the new world of JavaScript syntax.
Do you teach Python?
Who made Scratch?
Scratch was created by Mitch Resnick, a student of Papert’s, and is considered to be the successor to Logo. It embodies many of the same ideas, including “objects-to-think-with,” “anthropomorphizing the computer,” and “turtle geometry.”
Does my child need to have any prior coding experience?
What is your refund or makeup policy?
For scheduling make-ups, we require 3 days notice for scheduling (i.e. for a Monday make-up, the request must be made by 4 pm on Friday). In addition, make-ups that are scheduled, aren’t eligible for rescheduling a second time.
My student has programmed before. Will this class still be challenging for him or her?
How old does my child have to be?
Is there homework?
What's makes your class different than other coding classes?
Where do you offer classes?
Does my child need to bring a computer?
What does my child learn?
What will my child be able to do after this course?
What programming languages will my student be learning?
How many instructors are there per student?
Do you teach Processing?
How is Java similar to JavaScript?
When will my child learn ‘real’ programming?
Fortunately, there is a simple criteria to determine if something is a ‘real’ programming language. A programming language is ‘Turing Complete’ if it can simulate any other programming language. At The Coding Space, we teach two Turing Complete programming languages: Scratch and JavaScript, and two non-Turing Complete languages: HTML and CSS.
In other words, Scratch is real programming. It has variables, loops, boolean logic, objects, message-passing, conditional branching, etc. What Seymour Papert said about Logo is true about Scratch: "Logo has often been described as a language for children. It is so, but in the same sense that English is a language for children, a sense that does not preclude its being also a language for poets, scientists, and philosophers."
We strongly believe that programmers of all ages benefit from starting in a block-based programming environment like Scratch. However, because of its seemingly childish nature, students often want to move to text-based programming way before they’ve exhausted what they can learn in Scratch. While we do encourage students to stick with Scratch as long as possible, we don’t hold kids back if they want to switch to text-based programming. As often as not, students realize text-based programming isn’t as fun as they expected and switch right back to Scratch, wisely leaving text-based programming for another day.
While Scratch is a real programming language, it doesn’t have nearly as many features as JavaScript, HTML and CSS. When a student’s Scratch projects gets beyond a couple hundred blocks of code, it’s about time to move to JavaScript. There they can learn to use arrays, functions that return values, first-class functions, variable scoping, functional programming principles, and much more.
Students’ transitions from Scratch to JavaScript with the WoofJS JavaScript framework, where they can continue programming with one foot in the familiar world of Scratch concepts and one foot in the new world of JavaScript syntax.
Do you teach Python?
Who made Scratch?
Scratch was created by Mitch Resnick, a student of Papert’s, and is considered to be the successor to Logo. It embodies many of the same ideas, including “objects-to-think-with,” “anthropomorphizing the computer,” and “turtle geometry.”
Does my child need to have any prior coding experience?
What is your refund or makeup policy?
For scheduling make-ups, we require 3 days notice for scheduling (i.e. for a Monday make-up, the request must be made by 4 pm on Friday). In addition, make-ups that are scheduled, aren’t eligible for rescheduling a second time.
My student has programmed before. Will this class still be challenging for him or her?
How old does my child have to be?
Is there homework?
What's makes your class different than other coding classes?
Where do you offer classes?
Does my child need to bring a computer?
What does my child learn?
What will my child be able to do after this course?
What programming languages will my student be learning?
How many instructors are there per student?
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