Meet Samaira

Samaira Mehta is a 13-year-old tech entrepreneur who founded Yes, One Billion Kids Can Code and created the popular board game CoderBunnyz to teach coding fundamentals through gameplay. She’s also created AI gaming platforms CoderMindz and CoderMarz, inspiring TIME to recognize her as “One of the 8 Young Leaders Shaping the Decade” and Hulu to call her a “real-life Powerpuff Girl.” Samaira has spoken at over 100 tech conferences and companies, including Google, Microsoft, and the United Nations.

Samaira’s Daily Sprints

How did Samaira become a tech entrepreneur before becoming a teenager? By learning to see coding the way she saw playground and board games: a set of instructions, a goal, and a fun puzzle to accomplish it. So Beginning Coder’s Camp is set up the same way: each session combines offline games and online coding challenges.

Day One: Becoming a Coder On Monday, young programmers will explore the magic of code as they give computers instructions and see the resulting actions. With both coding and physical activities, they’ll learn how to create and sequence instructions that return delightful events.

Day Two: Animations, Loops, and Events On Tuesday, campers will learn loops, events, and parallelism as they program scripts that make characters sing, dance, and perform.

Day Three: Open-Source Storytelling Wednesday emphasizes storytelling and paired programming, as coders work together to recycle or “remix” existing blocks of code to create their own unique stories. They’ll strengthen their knowledge of sequences, scrips, and more, while learning the powerful coding skill of collaboration.

Day Four: Game Design, Variables, and Conditionals On Thursday, campers coders will design and code their own games as they learn how to use variables and conditionals to make programs adapt to user inputs.

Day Five: Hackfest Friday is all about taking the week’s lessons and turning them into a capstone coding project. Will your camper choose to create a video game, a CGI music video, or something else? With their newfound coding skills, and the support of fellow campers, the possibilities are endless!

Small Groups, Expert Instructors

Camp sessions feature small groups of 6-9 campers led by an expert instructor, ensuring maximum participation, guidance, and collaboration. Instructors are chosen after an extensive vetting process that includes teaching demonstrations, background checks, and interviews to ensure both subject mastery and teaching ability.

AfterCamp Coding Challenges

Samaira’s camp code includes this if/then logic: if campers want to keep going when the day’s session is over, then there should always be coding activities to choose from! That’s why the camp clubhouse is programmed full of computer science games, quizzes, and challenges so the fun doesn’t have to stop when the daily program ends.

Featured Computer Science StarCourses

What better way to learn about the power of coding than from tech entrepreneurs and game designers? Your coding camper will gain exclusive access to computer science StarCourses and meet-and-greets, where they’ll see computer science through the eyes of Samaira and other tech visionaries.