When it comes to recent trends in learning, nothing has gained as much traction as coding has. The starting age to learn coding is now lower than ever before. But what about those who teach coding? Well, they have been getting younger too, as evidenced by the story of young Muhammad Ameen who is all of 12 years old. He began his own coding academy a couple of years back with help from his father and has since taught hundreds of kids on how to code. This Kochi-based youngster is truly an ace when it comes to coding.
How did this yen for coding begin? "Actually, my tryst with coding began when I was just 8 years old. I was given a block programming coding task at my school and upon completing it, I was very pleased. That's how I began learning coding for fun and soon became an expert at it. I began taking lessons for children when I turned 10 and since then, I started ABC Coding Institute, which is looked after by my dad," says young Ameen, when asked about the start of his journey in coding.
How does it work? "There is a lot of flexibility when it comes to our coding lessons online. We take the classes via Google Meet so that it is easy to access for both, the coding tutor as well as the student. In addition to that, our tutors come from all over the world which allows our students to be from all over the world as well. The timings are fixed as per the learners' interest. The students come from a very wide range of age right from age 6 to even 20 years old. We also have a variety of languages in which the lessons are taken," replies Ameen about the diversity of learners and tutors accommodated here at ABC coders.
Speaking about the interests of the students, Ameen adds "Most students that join ABC want to get into coding to understand video games. They would have played a lot of games in their childhood so they are intrigued about how they are made."
The teaching profession really runs in the family since both of Ameen's parents teach at their own school in Kochi. But Ameen was one who did not require much teaching by someone else to become an ace coder. His mother Rebina says, "Coding is a part of the syllabus at our institute, Akmis Future School. But Ameen took it up a notch higher by self-learning advanced concepts, till even robotics and Artificial Intelligence. He would refer to the internet for this and would try rewriting existing codes. He even built our website for ABC coders from scratch on his own."
Rebina also talks about how coding builds a sense of productivity among children. "Children join coding classes out of their own interest and hence do not waste time at all in other activities like watching videos all day. They get to build games according to their liking. This boosts their creativity," she opined.
A real aspect that causes students to come for more while coding is that it is output-oriented. Ameen's father Shihabudheen PK says, "Whatever idea we have in our mind, it can be put into effect by coding and the result can be achieved real-time. This excites the learners. Furthermore, we function on a reverse engineering model. We show the output first which piques the interest of the learner. They then break apart the system and try to rebuild the output from the theory that they have learnt. This is unlike conventional learning where a lot of theory is fed but with no end in sight. We have designed the curriculum on the basis of how to gain the attention of a young learner. We based it on Ameen himself to reach out to people his age."
