Why a non-programmer is starting a coding school

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I’m not a programmer. I know a few things about programming but I learned most of them not in expensive coding bootcamps but from free online tutorials and several searches on Stack Overflow in the past three months. But despite my background and lack of formal coding education, I feel I have something to contribute to programming education.

My entire career has been in the tech industry. I’m one of the founders of Yahoo! Answers, the world’s largest Q&A site; was a product manager for Google’s AI project, working for Ray Kurzweil; and have been involved in many software product launches for consumers and enterprises, desktop and mobile, and startups and corporate behemoths.

Throughout, I never coded. I took some Java classes here and there, but it was never necessary for me to code to have a great career in tech. While there may be dissenters, I think most engineers who have worked with me would rate me as a decent product manager. I could discuss scalability and machine learning with the best engineers at Google, but I never needed to implement a single HTML page.

I quit my full-time job in July to start my own startup bootstrap-style. I started to learn coding simply because I didn’t have any money to hire an engineer and my ideas were still too conceptual to look for a co-founder.

But the last three months in self-coding education opened up a whole new vista for me. Simple HTML, CSS, and Javascript enabled me to create multiple websites on my own. (And I didn’t have to write a complicated requirement document for an engineer to implement it!)

I learned enough Python and Django to create a directory-based web app with a search engine. It’s all horrible, non-elegant code with lots of cut-and-paste from Stack Overflow. But it’s been so liberating to feel creative–to see ideas turn into actual things with a few lines of code.

In fact, those three months of coding education have been such a transformational experience for me, that I’ve changed the focus of my startup to be a coding school for kids and others who have never coded before. I want other people to be aware of the incredible potential of coding, not just as a career, but as a lifelong skill or interest, much like painting or playing the piano.

It is truly mind-boggling how much free material is out there in learning how to code. Just going through w3school pages from start to finish gives you a comprehensive tutorial on basic web development. Stack Overflow can be like a personal tutorial from the best coders in the business. But why is there such a big gap between the demand and the supply for software engineers? Why do people shell out US$12,000 on average to these coding bootcamps?

I think the biggest element that is lacking in today’s coding education is not materials or a great online course software. It is motivation.

Today, programming education is one of these three:

1. Super dry: technical presentation of theory and the math behind algorithms (computer science degrees at university)
2. Cram schools for lucrative career skills that you acquire in a hurry to boost your income (coding bootcamps)
3. A game or toy builder that are offered to kids in expensive summer camps or one hour a year (ID Tech summer camps that teach Scratch)

But I think more people, kids in particular, will adopt coding as a lifelong interest if its presented as a tool for creation. Just like literacy opens up the whole world of books, coding literacy opens up a whole world of being able to create websites, apps, games, and even little robots.

To be clear, Code.org is an awesome initiative and I know great people who are involved in it. But I think there seems to be a belief that to teach computer science to kids, it has to be a game or a toy. Their solutions focus on the user interface problem and not on how we motivate the reason to learn coding. It’s like trying to teach painting by teaching exclusively through paint-by-numbers. I think it shortchanges how coding can be taught to kids.