Before writing a line of curriculum, Elizabeth Tweedale’s team at Coco Coders interviewed high school principals across the United States about what arrives with a ninth-grade class. Two answers came back often enough to shape the company’s entire model.
The first was technical fluency, or the absence of it. Students turn up able to operate applications and unable to reason about what sits underneath them, which makes the technical parts of almost every subject harder than they need to be.
The second was less expected and more consequential. Students have no mental map of the professional world. They can name the jobs they have seen and very few of the jobs that exist, and nobody has shown them how the two sets relate.
“They don’t even start looking at life after graduation until they are 16 or 17,” Tweedale said. “By then, they are faced with an overwhelming paradox of choice and almost zero context.”
The pattern matches larger datasets. The OECD reported in 2020 that career aspirations formed by age seven, already shaped by gender stereotypes and social background, move very little by seventeen. Education and Employers, surveying more than 20,000 UK primary children in 2018, found that under one percent had learned about their chosen job from someone visiting their school.
Coco Coders, founded in 2016 and teaching school-age children online, built its curriculum as a response to the second complaint rather than the first. The company runs ten-week foundation blocks followed by four-week deep dives, each anchored on an existing piece of technology. A module on ocean conservation takes students to Mr. Trash Wheel, the solar-powered device that collects debris in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, before asking them to build a game or simulation of their own.
“It’s saying, here was a problem, here was the solution. Now, what’s your idea?” she said.
The structural bet is that career context is easier to teach through infrastructure than through job titles. A student who understands that a regional animal shelter network runs on scheduling software has been shown two careers, not one, and neither of them appeared on a careers poster.
For school leaders, the practical question is where such exposure fits in an already full timetable. Coco Coders delivers outside school hours, which leaves the school day untouched and puts the widening work in the hands of families.
Details of the curriculum structure are published at cococoders.com.
About Coco Coders
Coco Coders is an online coding school founded in 2016 by Elizabeth Tweedale. It teaches Scratch, Python, HTML, CSS and JavaScript to school-age children through live interactive classes in group and private formats, and works with students in the United States, the United Kingdom and internationally. Course information is published at cococoders.com.
