02/07/2026
Exciting news, we are now a full 501(c)3 nonprofit, Coding4Kids.org, the home of Creative Coding!
https://coding4kids.org
Aloha my former students in Honolulu! I miss you all! It's me, Eric Fredrickson, founder of Creative Coding in 2013 and co-sponsor of our valiant effort to serve the islands a few years back.
So excited to be able post here again after a whole year!
We want to bring back our classes for your Keiki and teach them the joy of coding, the rewards of persistence, and the power that comes from mastery of technology.
And we are going to do it so much better this time. This time, we're coming to you, our alumni, and asking, is there any of your kids or their siblings from those early classes that is now an adult looking for a job? Is there any that has the heart of a teacher?
Can our 1st gen students give back to their own community, if we work together to make it happen?
If that sounds good to you, if any of you see the vision, most importantly if it feels good, please read on for some background.
We were so happy that you were so welcoming to one of our best, early employees (who was like a daughter to me, to be honest) when she moved to O'ahu permanently for her health and wanted to keep teaching for us, but we as a team were unable to support her the way we intended to, alas. It was too early. We had not built up the ability financially or operationally, to do it properly. I wish I'd managed that better.
I was so happy, though, that her brilliance, her sunny disposition, and her generous heart for teaching meant that when she left us (of her own free will, with my blessing and regrets) she received I think 3 immediate job offers to teach at several private schools as an employee.
What a relief for us both. Hello there, you know who you are!!! I miss you and hope you and your husband are well. You are some of the best people I've ever known.
Alas, the sub we quickly hired to replace our long-serving former employee, so we could honor our commitments to the home school center on base, was not properly vetted, so we to say goodbye to her and I took over that last class at the homeschool using virtual teaching so I could take care of them myself.
Which was great! We had so much fun over zoom! In a way that was a blessing because we weren't even sure it was possible to teach coding to kids remotely at that time, because according to zoom, literally no one had ever done it!
Did you know your kids were actually the very first kids in the world to learn coding remotely, 2 years before the pandemic? Together we made history, actually!
But it was hard for me to sustain those classes here with the time difference, so after we finished the 12 weeks we'd promised you, we didn't resume. We had to pull back and focus on our teaching team in Seattle. That was the right decision because it helped us survive the pandemic and emerge ready to transition to a nonprofit.
Yet, I still think about those days teaching in person Honolulu, especially the first two summer camps.
Those days were truly filled with joy for both me and my co-teacher. And the pictures still grace our website!
I wonder how your kids are doing, so if any of you parents see this, reach out! We'd love to zoom with you and reconnect!
On to the future! We would love to come back and are working on getting funding to do exactly that. And this time, as a nonprofit, we hope to do so at a price that more people can afford.
As a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit, we can give a tax deduction for donations. So sometime after the hype of the super bowl and the olympics dies down, I'll be reaching out to all of our alumni parents individually over the phone, and asking if you want to self-organize something.
I'm just putting this out there right now in case any of you spot this. You don't need to wait for me, here's the idea if you want to run with it: I want to hire someone local, someone you all trust and know would be a good coding teacher. They don't even need to know how to code! They just have to have SOME teaching experience or camp counselor experience and a good heart.
We have the framework for those of you who want to sponsor a few teachers and fund them to come out here to Seattle. We can put them up if you can cover transportation and a modest stipend for their homestay families, and together we can put them in classrooms for 4 weeks of intensive training as a student teacher for our nonprofit.
Your donations would be fully tax deductible, and you get to decide who you want to sponsor.
Obviously I can tell you what we're looking for and offer some suggestions, and it's a two-way street. You can tell us what WE should be looking for in hiring local so we can find someone who is likely to make a career out of teaching, starting with us. There would be some zoom interviewing and background checking because we can't take everybody.
I don't know how many we could hire, that would depend on how many you or your local group wants to sponsor, and how much money you want to raise, but there must always be some selection process and and the final decision of how to hire must be ours, as we're the employer. But we'd limit it to your pool.
I know, I know, virtually NOBODY will read all this. That's OK, I'm just putting this out there for the karma-driven universe to give to the right person, for now.
After our beloved Seahawks are done with the super bowl and the olmpics are over, I WILL make a video and post it more prominently, and we'll see if we can get a reporter to cover it, and if a group of local parents, like a rotary group or something, or a homeschool center (hint hint) want to sponsor someone, we can get them trained up under one of our existing 14 teachers here in Seattle, some of whom have been with me for 7, 10, even 12 years.
To recap, the Karmic proposal in the wind is this: If your local group can pay for their transportation and a modest stiped for food while they're here, we'll find them homestay familie(s) amongst our alumni, family and friends, so they can spend a month in Seattle learning how to teach coding (weekends off of course, it's a great city to explore) and then go back and teach in Hawaii.
Importantly, we won't repeat the mistakes of the past, so the sponsoring group would also have to set aside enough money to subsidize their classes so everyone, not just the private school kids, could be able to afford their classes. I'd like to have enough set aside to make this self-sustaining, but let's just take it one step at a time and plan for this initial project to last a year.
We can work out the details together if ANYone is interested in this idea, just reach out and we'll talk :)
I hope you won't take offense if I say something here in a language I don't speak, but this is sincerely meant as a gesture of respect to an ancient culture.
Pūpūkahi i holomua.
Eric
Coding classes in Seattle or online where kids can enjoy creating a game based on THEIR ideas while engaging creative and logical thinking.
