The senseis begin the ceremony, tying a black band around 11-year-old Grady Harden’s head, who has just capped his latest creation, a dinosaur-themed game called “Run and Jump.” The band reads “Code Ninjas” – a martial-arts-style program where kids learn coding and problem solving. Next, the senseis present Grady with his new belt – in this case, a yellow, RFID wristband.
At 116 Code Ninjas franchises open across nearly 40 states, kids aged 7 to 14 drop in after school and on weekends or attend summer camps. They work their way up from white to black belt by completing a coding curriculum that enables them to build video games on platforms like Minecraft and Roblox.
“Game play is still the best way to learn. The animal kingdom learns by playing and so do human beings,” says David Graham, founder of Code Ninjas and a programmer who lives in a Houston suburb.
Three years ago, while watching his son learn taekwondo, Graham had a revelation: Blend kid-centric coding lessons with the ancient ways of martial arts. At Code Ninjas, tech-sharp senseis– typically older teens – teach Scratch instead of side sweeps, robotics instead of roundhouse rights.
“This is a place where kids can be themselves. It gets rowdy in there and we don’t try to calm it down necessarily,” Graham says. “We encourage them to share their ideas, share their code, tell each other how they did things – those are the conversations developers have all the time.
Since a 2016 launch, about 15,000 students have attended one of the Code Ninjas locations, and the program’s one-week summer camps have taught 17,000 kids, Graham says. About 40 percent of the participants are female.
He built Code Ninjas and his curriculum using Microsoft tools – a product suite with which he’s long been comfortable, he says.
All laptops used by the ninjas are required to be Windows 10 devices. In addition, Graham and team built a web-based, JavaScript, game-building engine, hosted on Microsoft Azure, that upper-belt ninjas use to build their own games from their own imaginations.
Across the business, all franchises use Office 365, including Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, OneNote, To-Do and Stream. “That was an easy choice,” Graham says. “When you’re doing a startup, not having to reengineer all those tools just saved us time, money and energy that we could put into building our own business and building our own tools that were very custom to us.”
That, in turn, allowed Code Ninjas to make its fees affordable to students. On average, a monthly membership costs $225, which allows a child to drop in twice a week. (Fees can vary, depending on the market.)
When a fee is too high for families, a nonprofit arm called Code Ninjas Cares covers their participation costs through donations and even provides rides from distant neighborhoods to local franchises.
Graham’s immediate aim was to design a fun environment that deepens tech and life skills while giving more kids an opportunity to learn coding, sometimes called “the literacy of the 21st century.” He also points out that U.S. children are falling behind the rest of the world in STEM subjects.
The franchise opened in March. Before their launch, co-owners Lisa and John Samuelsen simply were looking for a coding program for their 9-year-old daughter.
“Kids can code at home, and that’s fantastic, but when they reach a challenge point, most kids are going to pull back and focus on something they’re good at,” says Lisa Samuelsen, who also continues to work as a software license manager for Autodesk.
On a recent afternoon, white-belts like 10-year-old Ben Menard stroll into the lobby with a parent in tow. The ninjas hit the dojo. Some parents leave. Others, like Ben’s mom, Samantha Menard, stay and chat in the lobby.
“It’s so impressive to me that he’s able to build his own games. He’ll talk to me about it and I’m like, ‘I have no idea what you’re saying,’” Menard says with a laugh. “We are always looking for that one thing that piques his interest. This might be one of those things.”
Inside the kids-only room, Ben already is adding lines of code to his curriculum-based game, “Dojo Invaders.”
He explains, offering precisely the type of description that mystifies his mom: “These masts go down, and I’m using an alien and a laser instead of a ninja and a shuriken. You’re supposed to destroy all the masts before they get to the ground.”
“It’s so fun,” Ben says. “It encourages me to do more things. It also gives me a goal to move up from white belt.”