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The Many Benefits of Studying Coding Twice a Week

Published on March 21, 2023 | Posted in ,  

We have all experienced a tense minute that felt like hours or weeks that felt like a day or two. Time can be an extremely relative, elastic thing. Students learning a new subject tend to absorb the material more fully when they immerse themselves and take multiple dives into the material.

Coding students of all ages and experience levels are tackling a subject that keeps them stimulated and challenged. They may not be overwhelmed, but the course material can be tricky.

Let’s look at some of the benefits of twice-weekly online coding classes for kids.

Repetition

Time is the best teacher. When you do something repeatedly, you develop new neural pathways over time that serve to create muscle memory or assimilate knowledge. Students who practice playing a musical instrument every day change how their fingers can move; those who engage in new material over and over more deeply absorb the information.

Taking coding classes twice per week is akin to diving into the deep end of learning computer programming rather than floating about the shallow end. If a student takes eight classes in a one-month span instead of four, they’ll be that much more familiar with the material.

If all other things equal, the student who took eight classes in half the time will be further ahead than their peers. The more frequently students encounter coding languages, the more readily it seeps into their subconscious.

Repetition is key to learning. The more condensed the repetition, the better.

Breaks Down Preconceived Notions

Coding can seem a bit foreign at first to kids or even adults new to it. Like any new subject, people have preconceived ideas about what computer coding is like. Maybe they have preconceived ideas about computer coders or coding culture.

The more time students spend engaged in the activity of coding, the sooner these distortions get replaced by the sense of what coding actually is. It’s wise to introduce your children to coding by having them do it a lot at the outset.

A mother and son sit at a desk in front of a computer

The quicker you break down their preconceived ideas, the quicker they understand what it’s really like. When kids spend time within specific coding languages, learning how to turn things they imagine into video games they can really play, their view of coding will be nothing like it was in the first place.

Practice, Practice, Practice

Onboarding kids into coding with twice-weekly classes is great, but this approach continues to be invaluable longer after they’ve gotten the basics down. Like learning a new language you speak or write in, students need to practice and express their coding languages to become more fluent.

They’re not exactly at risk of “use it or lose it.” But the additional time spent in twice-weekly classes helps to make coding second nature. At first, you need to think carefully about each word you type and the syntactical rules of a given coding language, just like somebody would when learning how to write or speak in a new language.

RP4K teaches kids and teenagers how to write code using the most in-demand languages today. Beginners learn how to create a video game they can play with friends and family, but students learn more as they progress within each language before moving on to the next one.

Our teachers ensure that each student is challenged and engaged without ever giving them more than they can chew, but there’s lots of room for growth. For example, young kids learn to create games called Serpent Temple and Pizza Bandit on Python.

The latter will strike parents as looking a lot like Pac-Man! It might not be a super complicated game, but that changes as older students learn to make customized modifications to Minecraft or learn to make other games in languages like C++ and Java Android Advanced.

Scheduling Our Twice-Weekly Lessons

The Real Programming 4 Kids twice-weekly lessons are offered in the spring and summer, as each period is a bit shorter than the ordinary school sessions. Such an approach allows kids to get almost as much learning in as they would in the regular school sessions, even if less time elapses.

Basically, instead of attending 18 weekly classes, students take two classes a week for 4, 6, or 8 weeks, with each class lasting for two hours. Kids can get as much as 16 hours of valuable learning time in only a month!

In the spring, classes are either Mondays and Wednesdays or Tuesdays and Thursdays, offered at 5 pm or later. In summer, this schedule repeats, except we offer earlier 1 pm courses.

Whether your child is learning to start from the beginning or sharpen problem solving skills, the twice-weekly class will get them there sooner.

What To Expect

When parents sign up for the RP4K twice-weekly lessons, they get the same level of elite instruction but in less time. Like always, we limit class size to a max of four students per teacher, so your child never has to raise their voice to be heard or struggle to be seen.

Real Canadian teachers from computer engineering or computer science backgrounds teach kids how to create video games, so the sessions are as fun and dynamic as the material is pivotal to learn! Your child will exit the program with the critical problem-solving skills the workforce looks for, higher self-esteem, and a smile on their face.

Learning STEM skills makes the youth better equipped to work one day and navigate their digital world today in the meantime. However, RP4K prioritizes fun for children above everything else. Whether you have a 7-year-old who is just starting their coding journey or a teenager on the verge of graduating high school and starting to plot their next moves, RP4K is for them.

If you want to master a skill, do it a lot. Everybody knows this approach works, but not every program accommodates motivated students looking to put the time in. The RP4K twice-weekly coding classes are an exception, so contact us today to book a slot or to clarify any questions you may have!

We offer free trial lessons to give parents a sense of what our sessions are like and ensure their child is in a suitable class. But don’t hesitate to reach out to us for more information.

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