We Raised $1.3M to Transform How Kids Learn to Code
Let me be the umpteenth person to remind you that coding is the most crucial skill of the 21st century. By now, you might feel like this point is being overstated. Career counselors, teachers, and the news have been feeding us this message ad nauseam for over a decade. However, when you look at the massive demand for coding skills across the globe - and the severe shortage of them - it's clear that the problem still needs solving.
Two years ago, in 2020, we realized that, like most societal challenges, the best place to address them is at the grass-roots level. That's why we focused on kids' education.
Tamir (left) and Pulkit (right) giving an in person coding lesson in Singapore.
Kids deserve better coding schools.
My co-founder Pulkit and I grew up in an era when even if you could attend an afterschool coding class, the experience was sub-par on every front. The learning method was usually dull and unengaging, the teachers were clearly selected on technical ability alone, and the projects were uninspiring to say the least (there are only so many times you can code bubble sort before losing interest in the subject entirely). Ultimately coding was not being taught joyfully.
When we looked at how coding is being taught in the present day, we expected there to have been leaps and bounds since we were kids. It was saddening, even startling, to learn that it's much the same, despite the incredible technological innovations we've witnessed over the past few decades. That's when we set out to change how kids learn to code.
We started speaking to parents about what coding means to them to try and understand which part of the chain was broken. Was it that parents still didn't value coding enough? Was it the education system's fault? Or was it simply that no one had figured out how to teach coding to kids in a compelling, useful way that would help them fall in love with the subject and commit to lifelong mastery of it?
On the upside, most parents we engaged with clearly valued coding. As one put it, "Coding is not the skill of the future; it's the need of this very moment." One of the critical reasons coding is a valued skill is that many parents view it as a way for their children to have a competitive edge in the increasingly competitive working world.
However, we also learned that the education system has failed to prioritise coding education alongside languages, math, and other sciences, and it's still viewed as more of an extracurricular activity than a core subject. We finally looked at some incumbent kids coding schools and afterschool programs. All those previously mentioned flaws - outdated learning methods, teachers who don't understand kids, boring projects - remained as glaring as ever. We simply could not understand how in the modern world, where coding is close to the lifeblood of all industry and innovation, why coding education (especially for kids) was still so lackluster. It was all the motivation we needed to start Strive, with the mission of making education more joyful.
The Strive Way
We wanted Strive to be everything the other coding platforms aren't. We started with a student-centric approach that focuses on active learning. This process involves students engaging with the curriculum through problem-solving, discussion, and applying their skills to visual-coding projects. This was simply because it's not just what you learn; it's how you learn. Most coding schools focus on instructing kids to build specific projects they can show their parents and friends, but that approach doesn't lead to mastery of coding. Kids learn rotely and only develop skills that can be applied in the classroom.
Then we considered the teachers themselves. They obviously needed to be coding experts to be credible educators. Still, we know that the most 'qualified' educators and not necessarily the most effective. Even for kids who like the idea of coding, it can still be daunting. We wanted to ensure that our teachers had exceptional EQ and understood how to engage with a kid on an emotional level too. It was important that our students loved our teachers because we believed it would be a crucial way to get them to commit to their coding education.
Finally, we wanted our coding projects to be fun for kids. Coding skills allow you to build incredible things, from games to apps to animations. Yet, most coding schools still push a dry, text-based style that feels less rewarding for kids. We wanted to show our students the exciting possibilities coding skills can unlock, so they can fully comprehend the potential of the skill they are learning.
Pulkit and I developed a simple mantra to guide the business: Coding education is a journey, and we want every Kid's journey to start with Strive.
Our latest funding round
Two years later, we're exceptionally proud to be delivering on our vision. We've built a coding school that has taught more than 1000 kids and has trained and employed more than 60 teachers. We've developed an active learning method that challenges students to think critically, problem solve and use their coding skills to build visual projects like games and apps. Our teachers aren't just highly-qualified coding experts: they're equally skilled at breaking problems down and empathizing with beginners. Our students choose projects that excite them and are guided through them at the perfect pace and depth for their experience.
But most importantly, we've reminded kids, many of whom have been jaded by hours of monotonous test prep and rote memorization for their school exams, that learning can be joyful.
There have been several milestones along the way that have validated that we're on the right track. One of the most critical ones was being selected to join Y-Combinators' ultra-competitive startup accelerator program, which incubated companies like Airbnb, Dropbox, Twitch, Quora, and Coinbase and currently has a combined portfolio of over $300 billion.
After the program, we closed our $1.3m seed funding round from notable investors like Goodwater Capital (Early investors in Facebook & Spotify), and angels like the president of MasterCard Asia and the Founder of Sequoia India.
What's next?
It's not time to pop the champagne just yet, though. More than anything, funding is an enabler, and we have enormous ambitions for Strive. Our primary focus is our product. In the coming year, we're setting out to
Develop our own coding editor (IDE) specialized for empowering teachers to teach and students to learn to code.
Create engaging coding content for kids of different ages, levels, and interests.
Exploring novel ways of assessing kids' mastery of coding, not just their ability to pass a test.
Develop our teacher training.
However, most importantly, our latest funding round gives us the resources to continue our mission.
A grander vision of making STEM joyful and meaningful
Our grander ambitions for Strive are much larger than creating an afterschool program for coding.
We're working towards redefining how kids learn STEM globally, by creating the platform and content to teach math, science, and other subjects through coding.
In the real world, when data scientists solve mathematical problems, they do so with code, and when engineers design bridges, they do so with computers. However, in schools, the picture is starkly different.
Students are still learning the same way as was taught 100 years ago, rote memorizing formulas and calculating by hand.
In real-world math, computers do almost all the calculating; by contrast, students do all the calculating in math taught at school. Not only are we teaching kids skills they'll never need in the real world, we strip these subjects of joy and meaning.
In light of AI, if we fail to teach students how to think for themselves and instead focus on teaching them concepts that are trivial for computers, they will be deemed redundant in the 21st-century economy.
For us, the first step in solving this problem is to figure out the best possible way to teach kids to code, to solve the problem of coding literacy. And then, in much the same way a paintbrush enables an artist to express ideas on a canvas, we’ll create the tooling and infrastructure to enable math, science, and other school subjects to be taught and expressed through code.
See how one of our grade 6 students learned about number patterns through code
We’re hiring. Join us in making kids’ education joyful and meaningful
We’re hiring across many positions.
