Future Coders Gets Support from Enthusiastic Computer Engineer

By Justin Mays:

A Turkish computer engineer, Mediha Aysen Yuksel opened Kodlama Atoylesi, a coding school to help children unleash their potential in coding. 

All this started when she met other computer engineers at Imperial College London, where she did her internship. 

“At that time, I met young people my age, but better computer engineer candidates than me. I found out that they were guided toward technology by their parents at a very young age because they were interested in it and were familiar with software growing up. That is when I understood the importance of young people learning to code early,” she says. 

 Yüksel indicated that multiple issues affect children learning to code, such as lack of sources and appropriate education. Learning software is a long process. 

 “You could learn JavaScript online from Codecademy, yet you need to know English. There are also Turkish sources but very few and not of good quality. And the issue does not end there. In writing code, you would encounter errors and problems, and the need for someone to direct your questions would be inevitable,” she added.

When Yuksel came up with an idea to introduce youngsters to coding at an early age, she approached her university, Istanbul Şehir University, in 2015. That year, the first group covered a 10-week training course.   

Kodlama Atolyesi is a social startup that runs coding workshop programs for underprivileged kids between 8 and 16 years old. It runs workshops online, face-to-face, and private classes. Children are taught algorithms and programming languages, while those at advanced levels will be developing and launching their games on the Google Play Store. 

“We have students who have been attending our workshops for seven years. Although they code very well on their own, they may need a quick solution to the errors they encounter,” Yuksel says. 

The programmer also highlighted that teaching children how to code produces new and original products.