Basketball and coding are much more similar than you might think. How so? Consider a recent article for Motherboard titled “How is Basketball Like Coding? Ask the Kids at This Madagascar Tech Camp.”
Emiko Josuka of Motherboard writes, “On Saturday mornings, Patrick Andriamahenina takes a group of 14 excited Malagasy kids through their basketball paces. But these are no ordinary lessons: Most have never touched a basketball before, and Andriamahenina is not using the lesson to teach them sport; he’s trying to teach them to code. ‘We’re drawing out the similarities between basketball and coding,’ Andriamahenina, a local Malagasy basketball coach, told me in French over the phone. ‘For example, while playing Scratch (a free programming language), kids have to think strategically and make quick decisions. It’s pretty much the same thing in basketball.’ Dream Camp—where 42 kids are currently receiving lessons—is a project geared to teach underprivileged Malagasy kids coding, conservation, sport, and hygiene. It was set up in November 2015 by Chris Corbett, the founder of Human Development League (HDL), a non-profit organization based in Madagascar. The Malagasy are an ethnic group that forms almost the entire population in Madagascar. The camp provides training to kids aged between seven and 12. To set up the pilot operations, Corbett teamed up with Andriamahenina, Malagasy coding guru Sahaza Marline, and basketball coach Cray Bony, who has run basketball camps in both the USA and Tanzania. The training venue is at the local technical high school, which has a basketball court but only five very old computers for roughly 1,000 students. ‘We really wanted to give these kids some coding skills that could help with future employment,’ Corbett told me. In a report, UNICEF states that out of the 100 children that attend primary school only 60 percent graduate, and only 25 percent go on to complete junior high school.”
When it comes to customized coding education, your best bet is CodeRev Kids. At CodeRev Kids, our lessons focus on computational thinking, which encompasses a wide variety of programming languages and concepts.
Our lessons build upon one another and we adjust starting points to each student’s level of expertise. Thus, the entire curriculum is customized. We are known for saying we are the most educational tech camp out there, but we also keep the focus on having fun. As a result, students stay engaged while learning to blend creativity with technology.