codary: start ‘em young!

“Digitalisation of schools is seriously lagging behind. We saw how schools struggled to reach kids during the pandemic… There are often no laptops for teachers, and many schools in Germany don’t even have wifi. Worst yet, we don’t have enough people with the right knowledge to tackle these problems: to digitalise Europe, you first need people with computer skills,” explains Amanda Maiwald, CEO and co-founder of codary, a Berlin-based online coding school. codary covers a range of topics, like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, and more, in a way that caters to the learning appetite of children and teenagers: “We teach kids how to code in a playful way. They’re taught by coaches, and we start from what they find fun, to make sure they stay interested and motivated.”

Customised by age, the courses also account for gender differences, as the company aims to promote computer science among girls too. “The first programmers were actually female, but then coding was rebranded as a nerdy thing for men. Now there’s many societal factors that come into play and after six, girls tend to think that maths is not for them.” For now, girls don’t yet make up half of codary’s end users, but Amanda wants to push in that direction, attracting more girls to computer science.

Given the potential impact that a project like codary could have, the company secured an investment from EIF-backed Educapital, a female-led venture capital firm specialising in the edtech sector. “We used the financing to reach as many kids as possible,” she says, “growing the team, developing the platform, and overall improving our outreach. We wanted to maximise our impact by raising awareness on the importance of IT skills - for both boys and girls.” Looking ahead, they’re planning to take these efforts further: hiring more people, creating even more classes and of course, explaining to more parents that coding courses aren’t just for their sons, but for also their daughters.