The recent marketing efforts of campaigns and code.org have been fruitful without question: people took part in the the hour of code, codeweek.eu and coding days. Though you can question the authority of some of the fore-speakers on that subject, more awareness arose. But is that really the problem - people not being interested in that subject? Is the missing interest really the reason why so few continue to learn to code? For the sake of argument, let’s assume a kid took a peak into it at one-hour-of-code and now wants to learn it, for real. How? What offers can she take?

School? Nope. Universities? Yeah, let’s not go there… Online courses and tutorials! Right, they’ve been around for years and most of them only take weeks to get through, right? So everyone is coding by now, right? Right? Okay, Online universities then. Their sign up numbers are impressive, the numbers promising. Aside from the drop-out-rate maybe – for some reason, they don’t like sharing them with us. Why not? Because they are horrifying. University is for most people, remove the social network and human interaction around it by putting it all online and you make things even harder. Let’s Face it: there is nothing for her to continue. We, as society, do not have any real offer for her to continue. But then, what good is it to tell people to learn to code if there is no offering following up in case that actually want to?

It needs more than marketing to get people to learn to code. It also requires offers to help people with it. With OpenTechSchool are making learning to code a more fun and successful journey for more people. Not only through workshops but also the continuous learning groups and the latest addition, Hackership – a full-time learning programme and master class for experienced developers. To grow this further we are setting up a tech-learning space in Berlin to run Hackership the during the day and more free, open and welcoming OpenTechSchool workshops and learning events in evenings and weekends. In order to get this going, we are missing some initial funds.

So please consider joining the OpenTechSchool movement and donate to make this space a reality. For a future in which it is easy and fun to learn to code.