theCoderSchool - Palo Alto, California

Jenine Palo Alto

My 10 year old daughter has been taking classes since last summer and really enjoys it. She's so proud of the games she's created. I never had to drag her to go. We've had a few different tutors and they have all been great. I like the follow up after the classes so that I can see what she's learned.

Gopi Shah Goda

We've had a great experience at the Coder School. Our child has learned so much through the 2:1 coaching and coding has becoming a passion!

Y G

We sent two kids there, but stopped going there in few months. They don't have a solid curriculum shared between the teachers to teach the students to reach the certain level, so each teacher has their own project that he/she let a student to work on.

It's fine if you get a good teacher and keep learning from him/her, but we had to change the teacher due to the schedule conflicts of my son. It looks like there was no communication between the previous and new teachers, so the new teacher had to spend the entire class time to find out what my son was working on and tried to figure out how he can fix the project. The new teacher told me that it is because the project my son was working on was the previous teacher's own project. He doesn't know how he can take over from there. We ended up stating a new project....

Also, we enrolled our kids for semi-private classes, but they got a different teacher because the manager Zach told us they are at the different level. They match students with same level. My daughter was assigned to her teacher to learn Python, and my son was assigned to a different teacher to learn Scratch. Although, they were enrolled into a semi private class, they were only student since there was no matching student at the beginning. That's fine. Few weeks later, my daughter met another student who started to learn together. Surprisingly, the new student was just started to learn with Scratch, which was similar to my son's level.... I don't think they have a system to match the students actually.

As the other reviewers mentioned, I don't think the class room is clean and healthy either. During the summer, they run AC and open the door, so I didn't feel much, but as it gets cold recently, they close the door. Whenever I stepped in the class, I smell something weird and feel air is not clean, circulating not enough or too many teachers and students in the small class area. I didn't ask my daughter, but she started to wear a mask when she goes in there and take off when she left the class by herself.

We have just ended the contract of both kids and started to look for another place. Hope this helps you to judge.

Anne C (AC)

I don't recommend this place at all.

First, the quality of teachers who teach my kid is poor. The teacher doesn't have enough ability to manage/teach the class, letting the kid sit there for the whole class (1 hour) doing nothing when he was dealing with another student. Moreover, it is not the first time. The last class, the teacher debugged by himself for the whole class and let my kid sitting there doing nothing as well.

Second, the school operation and system is a mess. They mismatched different level students in the same section. Further more, the teacher is new and inexperienced to teach this class. The school doesn't manage the teacher.

The worst part is the management and the customer service. My kid was crying due to the frustration that the teacher not teaching him at all for the continuous two lessons. The front desk person pretended not knowing what was happened from the beginning until I told the details. Then she admitted that they had the internal discussion of the issue and will refund the class / change the teacher. But they cannot even guarantee the same thing won't be happened to my kid after changing the teacher. So there is no internal management for teachers. The way and the attitude of handling the issue showing me they don't have basic customer service. Wasting time and destroying the passion of a kid's learning is more than a refund!

Nancy J

Mr. Griffin is the best! He’s very patient, funny, flexible and thorough. My daughter enjoyed her class so much and has requested to expand it from 30min to 1hr multiple times. She’s always so looking forward to the class and doesn’t want to leave at the end of the class.

Jackson Nghiem

My son who is 9 years old have been doing online classes with his cousins from Palo Alto, CA. I currently live in Sao Paulo, Brazil and my son does the online classes 4 times a month with his cousins. The teachers are nice and seems to know there way in teaching the kids in programming. My son has been doing these classes for around 8 months and he seems to enjoy it. I can see that he got some knowledge on programming because I use to be a computer science major myself in college. The school is accommodating on your schedule and make up classes are easy to make if you miss one. The staff that works there seems very easy going. I am happy with my son in these classes. I think it will give him some knowledge of programming in the future.

Hao Chen

My two kids are taking lessons at the Coder school. They like their teachers and have progressed nicely. The school is well managed, parents received session notes every time. They have good policy regarding make up and our communication with school is easy

Ann Protter

My son wanted to learn to program and the CoderSchool has been teaching him this summer. Last week my son started to be able to write a program on his own, and he spent hours busily coding and showing us the results. He is thrilled (as are we). His teacher has been great, the school is professional and responsive. Thank you so much!