Our Story - From C16 to One-on-one Courses

It was the summer of 1989 and I’ve just received the most advanced piece of technology an 11 year old of the time could dream of - Commodore C16. I immediately placed a prized tape with “Formula 1” title in the tape recorder and after a couple of minutes was rewarded with a bunch of squares quickly moving on the screen, vaguely resembling a car race. After a couple of hours of seeing roughly the same screen all the time I got bored. 

My eyes fell on a book titled “Commodore Basic”. This was my first close encounter with computer programming. Inside this book were listings of small programs I understood nothing about. So I embarked on a task of typing these into the computer. Yes, at that time you’d often get a printed listing of a program to type it in. Hard to believe today, isn’t it?

As I ploughed through listing after listing, suspiciously all these programs produced was a “Syntax Error”. That was clearly not right. Mind you the book didn’t have any pictures, but the descriptions promised something else, or at least I hoped. A couple of hours more and I tossed the book in the corner of the room and promised myself to never ever look into it again.

That would have been the end of the story, were it not for uncle Jack, who just retrained to take over software development in the nearby shipyard. He sat down with me, for hours at a time and patiently explained, how it worked and why the things I typed in didn’t. I remember till this day the first program we worked on together. It was nothing special. Just a number of eclipses drawn on the screen. I remember toying with it for the rest of the day, changing various parts to see how the outcome changes. And I was the happiest boy on earth. 

My parents, at the time, understood only one key on the computer, the power switch. You can imagine their amazement, when they saw me confidently writing more and more complicated programs. Each one of them made me even happier than the previous one. The seed has been planted…

A computer science degree and twenty years of commercial experience later, I found myself explaining the basics of computer programming, now widely known as coding, to my own children. Together with my wife, we embarked on a quest to provide it to as many children as we can.

The beginnings were not easy, as the covid pandemic just started with ensuing lockdowns. We moved online and realised it is actually more convenient for everyone. And then we made a discovery which changed our courses forever: with online we can offer one-on-one tuition which beats anything else many, many times. 

And so the cycle repeats itself. Over thirty years ago, I was frustrated and just about to ditch computer science forever. Today parents are calling us for help, with their frustrated children, just about to ditch programming forever… Thirty years ago my uncle Jack passed on his passion for coding through patience and one-on-one approach. Today we hire only the most talented instructors, to pass on their passion and knowledge through patience and one-on-one work focused on the tutee needs.

The result? See what the parents say:

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