About Us
Code For your Kids was created by a team of math education researchers, educators, and students at Vanderbilt University and University School of Nashville. Our work was funded by a grant generously provided by the Edward E. Ford Foundation. Meet our team!
Our Story
The math department at my school is fantastic. We’ve got a rich diversity of experience, with teachers fresh out of college, veterans with 30+ years in the classroom, teachers with experience in policy and industry, and even a math Ph.D. On top of that variety, there is a very healthy spirit of collegiality. Needless to say, our department meetings are always full of fruitful conversations that are inclusive of very diverse perspectives. In a department meeting in 2019, we were asked by our chair if there was anything that we felt we ought to be including in our curricula but weren’t. Justin, a particularly insightful and sympathetic colleague, said that he had recently spoken to an alumnus who had gone into a STEM field. The alum told Justin that he wished he had more experience with code and the ideas surrounding it. We began to discuss the usefulness of coding in the math classroom and the reality of the growing need for graduates with computational skills. Around this circle of diverse perspectives, a consensus emerged- we should be teaching our kids how to approach problems computationally and expose them to computational methods used in the real world. But immediately after that, one after another, we began to discuss our own lack of experience and intimidating at the prospect of learning to code. Having a lot of experience myself, I resolved to write a few workshops for my colleagues as a gentle introduction to coding for a math classroom setting. At that moment, CodeForYourKids.com was born.
- Andrew Hedman, Founder