Children’s technology education has a recruitment problem it rarely names. Programmes attract the children who already like computers, then report high satisfaction among children who already liked computers.
Coco Coders was built to break that loop. Founder Elizabeth Tweedale studied computer science at university, where she was often the only woman in the room and where the culture was dominated by peers who had been gaming and tinkering since early childhood. The head start functioned as a filter, and it filtered before anybody was assessed on anything.
“Coco Coders is explicitly designed against that pattern,” Tweedale said.
The design decision shows up in how a project is structured rather than in marketing language. Two children work on the same build and approach it from opposite ends. One concentrates on game mechanics and back-end efficiency, working out what makes the system behave correctly. The other builds the narrative world and the visual interface, working out what makes the system make sense to a person.
Both finish with the same foundational technical literacy. Neither was asked to become the other, and neither route is treated as the remedial one.
That maps onto how technology companies staff themselves. A product needs the person who writes the algorithm and the person who understands the human experience it is meant to serve, and there is no version of the org chart where only one of them is technical.
The company, founded in 2016, teaches school-age children in live online classes covering Scratch, Python, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It runs ten-week foundation blocks followed by four-week deep dives built around a real technology, and states that its classes require no prior experience and are designed for all levels including neurodiverse learners.
Why the entry point matters this much is visible in the aspiration research. The OECD found in 2020 that seven-year-olds’ career aspirations already reflect gender stereotypes and social background, and change little by seventeen. Education and Employers, surveying over 20,000 primary school children in 2018, found under one percent had learned about their chosen job from a school visitor. Children are sorting themselves into and out of fields on the basis of who those fields appear to belong to.
Course structure is published at cococoders.com.
About Coco Coders
Coco Coders is an online coding school founded in 2016 by Elizabeth Tweedale. It teaches Scratch, Python, HTML, CSS and JavaScript to school-age children through live interactive classes in group and private formats, and works with students in the United States, the United Kingdom and internationally. Course information is published at cococoders.com.