2018. 2019. Looking back. Looking forwards.

year += 1

We attach a lot of significance to our human-defined end of year, with all it’s routines and rituals. The Earth doesn’t stop to pat itself on the back as it orbits the sun, but most of us do.

And I’m glad we do. I’ve always enjoyed this time of year. As we approach the 31st we have this opportunity — artificial as it may be — to reflect upon the year that’s ending and look ahead towards the new year. We could do this exercise on the 6th of May, but we often choose the December-January transition to do so. So be it.

At codetoday we’ve had a wonderful and very busy year as we marked our second birthday earlier in the year. Our community has grown from all sides with many new students and instructors, new courses and ideas and our new offices too.

A few years ago we set out with the vision of transforming how coding is taught to young learners by refuting the idea that there is a choice to be made between rigour and engagement.

We did not believe that children-specific platforms are the way forward nor that teaching a real language such as Python must be painful and boring.

Some of the lesson plans we created in our early days, designed to make learning programming through a proper language such as Python both thorough and fun, are still in use today. But we have many new ones constantly being developed and deployed. Developing new material is one of the most enjoyable aspects of my job, second only to teaching itself.

In recent months we have been revising our curriculum to better enable us to follow students along the path from absolute beginners to proficient programmers, including developing our more advanced material further. One of my favourite new lessons from recent months is the flying birds animation that introduces Object-Oriented Programming.

What about 2019? What does the crystal ball say? Well as Niels Bohr once famously said: prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

Some things we do know already though: the first term of 2019 is our busiest one ever, thanks to a staggering 90% of our private groups from this term renewing for next term too, and many new courses coming through referrals from existing customers (and we are sorry for those groups we couldn’t accommodate).

We also know very well what our plans are for 2019. We will step up our expansion with an ambitious business plan that will see us not just expand our existing flagship courses both in numbers and geographically but also venture in new territory using the experience and expertise we have developed over the past years. In addition to the big changes there are also many smaller ones starting from the introduction of our codetodayCLUB to more and better resources to use during and after the course.

With all the changes coming up, we also need to remember the things that will remain the same in 2019 as they have always been at codetoday:

our focus on treating coding as a serious subject;

our commitment to exceptional customer service (all businesses say this, but we actually mean it and practise it);

our passion for both programming and teaching…

and,

the certainty that whatever our grand plans will be this time next year leading into 2020, these fundamental principles will not have changed.

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