 4 September 2020 was a special day for us as we celebrate the selfless service, dedication, commitment and the service of our beloved teachers. Coming to the last quarter of the year 2020, the pandemic situation caused the world to be in a flux. The entire education scene changed - we shifted to full home-based learning (HBL) in early April for close to a month with all preschools, MOE kindergartens and student care centres to suspend their general services during the period. With this, educators have had to play new roles. We experienced it first-hand at Kodecoon Academy when our teachers got on long phone calls with parents to guide them through the installation process of Zoom, worked hard at coming up with standard operating procedures to share with the team and parents on how we can ensure privacy of our students, and also checking in with our parents and students regularly to see how they are adjusting to home-based learning. Our teaching team also organised online webinars to discuss topics like cyber wellness and tips to juggle work and family during this period to provide our parent community with resources and the support they might need. This is why we secretly worked together with our parents and students to come up with this secret appreciation project to surprise our teaching team. Read on to see what our students have to say - Kodecoon teachers, if you are reading this article, prepare a tissue box beside you.
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 At Kodecoon Academy, we are strong advocates for our students to apply what they have learned and be active creators of technology, not passive consumers.
To ensure we keep our students stimulated even while staying at home during this circuit breaker, we challenged our students to participate in the #CoSpaceAtHome creation contest! Organised by CoSpaces Edu, an online platform for kids to build anything in 3D, students from all over the world can submit their creation using a visual coding language (CoBlocks) to program their creations and explore in Virtual and/or Augmented Reality! The rules are simple: participants will need to create an original and interactive CoSpace on their own, they can include animations, constructions from building blocks, and CoBlocks code. Additionally, they will have to create the project connecting to the current situation of Coronavirus pandemic as a theme. Contest results came out just two days ago, and we are so excited to reveal that… 
With the extended circuit breaker measures, our parents not only have to juggle work from home and family commitments. From the closure of physical enrichment classes to shifting to full home-based learning, there’s been significant changes to how learning is now conducted and these thus raise new concerns.
We all should expect a new normal even after the circuit breaker period. Everything is now digital. Will the surge in screen time now for kids outlast the circuit breaker period as our children develop new habits? Read on to find out the main takeaways and lessons from this webinar. Special thanks to our guest speaker, Mr. Chong Ee-Jay, Deputy Head of FamChamps, who provided us with some illuminating pointers. We would also like to thank all the parents who have taken their precious time out to attend this webinar and participated actively in the discussion. 
This Mother’s Day, to celebrate and appreciate our hard working mommies, we teamed up with our Kodecooners and made a surprise video! Check out the heartwarming video here.
In the video, we have heard from our Kodecooners talk about how they want to make their moms proud by getting into a good university, how they are thankful for taking care of them tirelessly for all these years (and many years to come) and even little loving moments they shared like, making boba tea together!
On the flip side, what would our mothers have to say? We conducted a virtual interview with a few mommies in our Kodecoon community. Read on to hear about their views on technology, how it is like being a working mom and how they engage their children to maximise their learning potential!  Throughout the years, we find numerous terms or buzzwords in business press and academic literature that refer to an increasing inability to grasp the world and keep up with the issues happening around us.
Introducing VUCA. It stands for the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity in the world around us right now. When we see VUCA, we naturally think of the Covid-19 situation that resulted not just in the disruption of the world economy, triggered societal panic and groupthink behaviour - panic buying, but also dragged down Singapore’s economy leaving shopping streets and eateries empty and employee pay cuts by companies in order to stay afloat. Many companies are opting to work from home and small businesses in the service industries are taking the brunt of the whiplash effect with front-line employees fearing for potential job loss. Indeed this brings short-term pressure on some industries that require physical labour, however, it also brings about opportunities for companies to adjust and disrupt their industry by bringing in new ways of doing things to meet customers’ needs. Knowing to digitalise processes and ways of doing things then allow individuals to react fast in face of volatile and ambiguous situations like this and come up with alternative solutions.  Over the past few weeks, the spotlight has been on the deadly coronavirus that has been reported in over two dozen countries and territories. Such news has created anxiety and fear among many people, as masks and hand sanitizers also get out of stocks at major pharmacies.
We understand this is a worrying time period for all our community, especially for the parents and our younger students who might not understand some of the procedures or what is going on. Quoting June, one of Kodecoon’s parents in this Channel News Asia article, "We do not know how this pandemic will pan out, but we can control our thoughts and choices today. By all means, take the necessary precautions but in order to emerge unscathed through this crisis, we need to balance fear with equal doses of calm, wit and trust.".  Growth is not easy. There are times when it is thrilling and other times when it is defeating.
We started on a journey to prepare students for the fast-changing world of technology by exposing students to digital literacy and computational skills. It required up-to-date top notch technology courses, our team of passionate teachers, and a creative mind to constantly innovate and come up with new curriculum for our students. Not forgetting doing all these while we stay true to the heart of Kodecoon Academy which is our passion and commitment to the student and parent community. As time flies past and we approach the end of January 2020, it is a good time to reflect on what Kodecoon has accomplished and share some of our directions for this year. -  Since we started in 2016, growing seven-fold from a two-men team, our vision has always been consistent - to adopt a student-centred approach in our pedagogy to promote a proactive learning environment. In this increasingly fast-paced digital world, students should not be afraid to learn and try new things. At Kodecoon Academy, students are able to effectively learn through an active class discussion and apply what they have learned to projects in their own areas of interest. It is with our students’ passion for technology, our team’s passion towards education and our parents’ unwavering support for Kodecoon Academy that we are able to rank ourselves as #1 for having the best in-application based coding classes.  For that, we thank every student, parent and partner who made it possible for us to participate in your (or your child’s) coding journey. As we come into this new year, we took some time to listen to what our parents have to say about us. We are thrilled and really humbled that so many of our parents took the time and effort to leave very detailed and meaningful reviews on our Google and Facebook page.  Check out some snippets below:
“Excellent teaching, and really dedicated coaches here. The teachers are a really special bunch. They love what they do - it's clear - and they are great at teaching. What's best is the way they handle the kids well. I get the feeling that there are clear and loving boundaries in place to enable a respectful, safe, and yet exciting learning environment for the children. I really liked the specific and insightful feedback that I've received regularly from coaches at Kodecoon. The individualised approach and service offered is really refreshing and nothing like I've experienced before at other learning centres. =)” - Lynette C, Google review (Jan 2020) “You know you have selected the right school for your kids when you hear them asking for more lessons. Kodecoon has interesting coding lessons delivered by dedicated and patient teachers.” - Fern Fern, Facebook review (Jan 2020) “If you want to heed Tim Cook’s advice to let your child learn how to code, Kodecoon is the place to go. The lessons in Kodecoon are very well-structured, ensuring to instil the correct concepts of coding in every learner in the proper order, regardless of the language the child is learning. But it is not all about work and no play! With the progression of each lesson, children are encouraged to be creative yet logical whilst putting into application the concepts they had learned into completing exercises and mini assignments such as creating their own game, with their own gameplay and rules. What makes Kodecoon stand out is also the team that is made up of dedicated teachers who are passionate about coding (and teaching it) and imparting that skill to every child that comes to Kodecoon. If you allow your child any screen time at all, then make it worthwhile at Kodecoon. And who knows, your little one may very well go on to become the next tech wiz of the century!” - Joyner W, Google review (Dec 2019) “Highly recommended! My son was always looking forward to his Saturday coding classes to learn new things and meet his friends. He was able to develop his creativity and his confidence while applying all his learnings from Kodecoon! Kudos to Deddy and his team! All the best!” - Cat Lagmn D, Facebook review (Dec 2019) “Teachers from Kodecoon are such a patient,loving and caring teachers. They teach coding in such a fun and easy for children to understand and pick up coding skill fast. Getting a replacement lesson is never a problem with Kodecoon. Teachers are so passionate with their teaching, students are their younger friends” - Dan Qi, Google review (Jun 2019) Can't decide if you should sign your child up our trial class? Perhaps this simple quiz will help! What sets Kodecoon apart from other coding schools, is that we take the interest that your child exhibits in coding and programming very seriously. This means that if our Kodecoon Instructors notices that your child is not keen on learning more about the digital world (and that is completely fine!), we would not recommend our coding classes to them. After all, we understand that each child will have their own passions, and who knows, they may show their interest a couple months or years later!  Take this simple quiz to find out if you should sign your child up! We are EXTREMELY proud of our teams, PHPPS and The Scratchies for their creative and original Scratch projects that saw them each beating 30 teams in the Junior Category and taking home the 2nd and 3rd prize respectively! Code XtremeApps is an annual hackathon competition organised by the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) and this year, Kodecoon sent 3 teams to compete and they sure did us incredibly proud!  Winners of code::XtremeApps:: 2019! |
