-There is 0 training. You are expected to come knowing the fundamentals of 1 and 2 programming languages as if you have been doing it for 4 years straight, or since highschool. I would recommend this job after your 2nd year of Freshman.
- Good luck getting help from other coaches that are too busy teaching their own classes except for the bare minimum or as assistants for your class.
-Too much emphasis on Scratch. Scratch is a pseudo-programming language that is not useful at all in the real world, but management forces you to teach it as a customer enrollment count. Looks and sounds good on paper/technologically illiterate parents but terrible execution in the real world.
-Enrolling students that have poor keyboarding skills, don't know how to use a computer, or are just there because their parents want them to be there can be disengaged from the class. I had one student that was literally pecking keys at the keyboard in a python class and slowed the entire class time everytime despite the other students able to keep up. There should be a minimum requirement guideline before students are just thrown into Python from Scratch classes or coming in on their own.
-Enrolling students that are either too young or too old for certain classes. A 13 year old was enrolled in Scratch once and a 8 year old enrolled in python. The 8 year old had a difficult time in the python classes and the 13 year old was too advance for the Scratch classes. Some younger students can do Python but again, guidelines are needed.
-Too much emphasis on a child's happiness for trials as an indication if you should keep your job or not. Some students will not understand programming or may not even like it, and it shouldn't be expected that they all must sign up for classes as a result after every trial. The parents also are normally clueless about programming themselves and may complain/hassle about some concepts that are needed that are actually taught in the courses, or needed in programming in general. Such is x,y and z axis in Scratch, Roblox, and Unity.
-Way too much emphasis on project-based only teaching. This is why students have trouble understanding what variables are and methods and other fundamentals in programming because they are thrown constantly into the 'fun' aspect of programming by making zombie shooter games or some other game-type follow-along coding session. In real life development, you will not be doing zombie-shooter games in programming unless you are a game developer. You will have to do debugging and understand how the code works for different types of applications, and this is not being taught properly at this company. A possible cripple effect when the real-world hits and the youth realises their program isn't going to run all the time when they hit the green-flag or Run button in the compiler or that their not going to be making a video-game every single time.
-Management themselves has very little to no coding skills themselves, often times often clueless to how things actually work, and easily sides with picky parents that are equally as clueless.
-Low pay for multiple skills that should require a minimum of $50.00 an hour or up. The maximum pay is $20.00 an hour.
-There is no full-time option, only part-time.
-You don't get to choose what you want to teach in this company. Again, they force and emphasize you to do multiple Scratch classes for an enrollment-count which can be a time-waster to the instructor. Its just a drag-and-block language created by MIT to impress technologically illiterate parents and look good on paper, but serves no purpose in the real world.
-This is NOT a company which you can grow in long-term. There are no benefits because everything is part-time, there is no actual training, and there is no skill-growth other than what you can come with that can add to the company while getting paid low the recommended salary for those skills that you have. I would recommend this company for 1 or 2 years maximum but be prepared to look for employment elsewhere because this is a dead-end tech job and it doesn't look like that is changing.
-The Summer-Camps can add more money but expect long hours and back-to-back sessions a day. Be prepared a week-in-advance for the amount of teaching to do.
-The App Gallery at Coder-School is terrible. Many programs are either choked-full of bugs or may even contain inappropriate terminology from the kid that slipped by the Coach that was publishing the app. Often times you may have to develop your own apps to teach because of these issues, I would not recommend the app-gallery until going through the apps and making sure they work well enough to teach.
-As mentioned above you may have to develop and teach your own apps. The company does not compensate for this.
