Why Your Students Should Learn to Code

For students who will all too soon be entering the workplace, coding will offer them a competitive advantage. Not only because of the high demand for programmers in the jobs market, but also because coding gives students entering other fields hot-skills that their peers may lack. This can be a real advantage as students apply for internships and entry-level jobs. Coding also gives students an understanding and level of comfort with today’s technology.

Coding has other, less obvious, but perhaps even more valuable advantages. It teaches students critical thinking skills that condition them to tackle problems in a structured way, breaking down the problem-solving process into logical step.

Another advantage for students is the immense sense of accomplishment that building apps, making mods, designing graphics, controlling electronics or creating websites gives them. In this world where, for young people especially, so much self-value is placed on the unattainable and the superficial, the more students can be proud of what they do, the better.

Because we believe in the value of coding for young people, Ripcoder is on a mission to bring our love of coding and computers to kids in Dublin. We want to show students how rewarding, satisfying and how much fun coding can be. One advantage of coding is the huge scope for follow-on learning. Once their interest has been ignited, students are able to leverage what they learn and take the initiative to continue learning on their own. We want to start the fire.

Based on our experience teaching code to young people, we have developed a selection of suggested workshops and courses that offer schools flexibility and at the same time ensuring course are highly engaging, educational and appropriate to the age of the students. Our outreach courses range from single, once off, workshops intended to spark an interest in coding to 20 week courses that will give students a foundation in coding.

For Primary Schools these include Budding Game Development Workshop for very young students,Tags, a 2 hour html workshop,Javascript Code Warrior where students use Javascript to battle robots, Mods in Minecraft, & Full STEAM Ahead a 5 week course of science, technology engineering, art and maths that mixes coding, automation, animation, game development and graphic art.

For Secondary Schools - Transition Year is an amazing opportunity to learn new skills and find out if coding is for you. We have a number of suitable 45 study-hour Transition Year Units including a fully functional School Student News Website, Appsolutely Awesome android apps module and Robots-r-Us, an automation module.

Please email us at if you would like a copy of our schools brochure detailing the courses above.

We are flexible and open to listening to what you require and coming up with a custom plan to accommodate your needs. If you would like something other than the suggested courses, please take a look at the many classes we offer at Inventors Club. If there is something of special interest to you we are happy to look at putting a class together for you.

Our curriculum is developed to comply with the NCCA ICT and the learning principles of the Primary School Curriculum guidelines. We teach in a way that allows student to be agents in their own learning. We allow student the room to use what they learn to explore alternatives and modify their programs. We harness student natural curiosity and make our classes fun and interactive. Concepts are revisited and built upon. All lessons are child focused and explanations are illustrated using analogies that are real and topical to the students.

Classes are taught on our machines specially configured with all the necessary software installed, so students & teachers don’t have to waste time downloading and setting up programs. This means we can all focus on the lessons. But if students want to work on their code at home they can access their work from our servers. Course notes are also available online to our students. We encourage teachers to take up where we leave off and so we are happy to advise teachers on the software we use (most of which is free software) and suggest ways teachers can continue bring coding into the classroom.