Educators will have access to coding kits for the Hour of Code this Dec.
Bitsbox, a Boulder-based education technology startup that teaches children how to create their own apps, will donate 1,000 coding kits to educators around the world for the Hour of Code during Computer Science Education Week (December 7-13).
After closing a $500,000 seed round this past August, the startup will train 1,000 teachers around the globe to run an Hour of Code event for 30,000 students.
“Our mission at Bitsbox is to teach every kid to code, and the Hour of Code is a critical introduction for so many children. By offering free classroom kits to teachers, we’ll be able to reach tens of thousands of kids,” commented Bitsbox CEO and co-founder Scott Lininger.
Educators in the U.S. and Canada receive a free physical kit in the mail, and teachers throughout the rest of the world that sign up gain access to a digital kit.
This startup’s most recent corporate social responsibility initiative overcomes the dual challenge of computer science education: It is not simply that many kids are unfamiliar with writing Javascript; many teachers themselves are not trained in teaching code.
The 1,000 teachers that will host a Bitsbox Hour of Code [1] with 30,000 students this December will be able to teach Javascript to future students after CSEdWeek, allowing this initiative to snowball and potentially reach hundreds of thousands of students in the coming years.
Material from a press release was used in this report.