How CodeMonkey Taught Thousands of Kids to Code in 2 Weeks

Ever wonder what the best way for students to learn a new topic is? Is it through test-taking? Working on a collaborative project? Going on a school field trip?

If you chose the latter, we like where your mind is at. We all remember how fun school field trips were when we were younger and changing a student’s environment to facilitate fun activities helps boost kids’ ability to learn.

Schechter School of Long Island in Jericho, NY

In an effort to successfully vamp up students’ knowledge of code in a fun and effective way, CodeMonkey  has been holding an annual coding competition called Code Rush since 2017. Code Rush is a two-week long competition that acknowledges that students learn best when they are in a new and encouraging environment. With new challenges released weekly, students in 3rd-8th grade from all over North America learned to code in a real language by solving challenging puzzles. During the two weeks in March, students and their team leaders (such as a teacher, coding club instructor or librarian) put time into the day to complete newly released challenges that taught increasingly more difficult coding concepts.

Students do not need any previous experience to participate. In the years since the launch of CodeMonkey’s national coding competition, students who have never coded before quickly developed a knack for coding that goes beyond an hour of code.

This year’s Code Rush was no exception. There were hundreds of teams and thousands of students participating from all over the U.S. and Canada. Students completed a total of 67 never-seen-before challenges that involved navigating a monkey through space to catch bananas.

Eleanor Van Gelder School in Edgewater, NJ

For a list of this year’s winners, visit here.

ABOUT CODE RUSH:

Code Rush is CodeMonkey’s annual coding competition for 3rd-8th graders in the U.S. and Canada. During the competition, students work together in teams to solve as many CodeMonkey challenges as possible, all the while learning real text-based code. Winners of the competition will receive various prizes.

LEARNING OUTCOMES:

Code Rush helps students improve their computational thinking skills, problem-solving skills, analytical thinking, teamwork skills, generalization and abstraction of problems, ability to find similarities and differences between problems, pattern recognition, object-oriented thinking and independent working skills. In Code Rush, students use and learn the programming language CoffeeScript, a multi-purpose language that is similar to English in its syntax. For more fun content, view our subscriptions.

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