A new after school program popping up in neighborhoods around the nation



You’ve got Kumon and Mathnasium, but there’s a new after school enrichment center popping up in neighborhoods around the nation! 

We’re all pretty familiar with our favorite apps, but someone has to write the code that makes them work!

These days more and more kids are getting exposed to coding early and that’s the idea behind a relatively new type of neighborhood school called The Coder School.

Recently, we got to visit The Coder School in Cerritos to check out what goes on in a typical day.

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Once I arrived, I met Kassius Capito, a 10-year-old, who showed me a game he actually coded! He told me he created about 20 games already!

Like a lot of kids across the country, Kassius got the coding bug early.

"Coding is the basic literacy of technology," said Dipali Patel, owner and general manager of the Cerritos Coder School.



"The skills that they learn here, the problem solving, logical thinking, they all transcend into any occupation that they choose to go into," explained Patel.

At the school, kids learn Swift, which is Apple’s programming language for the iPhone.

Also, there are about six to eight children per coding class.

Kids learn about how to use Scratch, a free kids programming language developed by MIT.

"It really teaches them the basic learning blocks of coding and it's where we start our kids off with," said Patel.



There’s also HTML, CSS, Python, Javascript, and a bit of the startup culture!

So now, in addition to music, reading, art, and other extracurriculars, there's coding!

"It’s just fun to think that maybe one day you’ll be creating stuff that other people will use and maybe you’ll improve their lives," said Collin Lara, a student at The Coder School.



It's like learning a new language now - that can really pay off later!

"It’s a necessity for any child to understand the logic and the reasoning behind coding, whether they’re going into health care or financial services. Everything is going that way anyways," said Apollo Capito, the father of Kassius.

It's great to see kids so into coding, plus it's a lot of fun!

The Coder School has 40 different locations in 14 different states. Classes run about $140 a month.