Teaching coding to give back to the community: How a trip to Asia can change a career path 

Dylson Valente Neto shares his experience of how a trip to Vietnam played a crucial role in shaping his career path and why he decided to teach coding in our project focused on empowering children through coding skills.

We have partnered with NearForm, a leading open-source company, to create online coding classes in English that lay the foundation for children's coding knowledge. The session of "Coding for Kids" was held at the Community Learning Center in Ngoc Bai Village, Quoc Oai district, located on the outskirts of Hanoi. During this session, children learned from Dylson how to make design decisions while using Scratch. The project allowed kids to create their own app featuring a character whose eyes followed the mouse pointer, and they were thrilled to animate a story with a surprise element.

Why did you decide to volunteer for this teaching opportunity?

I chose to volunteer because the whole experience resonated with my own personal journey. When I was in my early 20s, I traveled to Asia and had the chance to visit Hanoi. It was during that time, while working on a website for a personal project, that I felt a shift in my career focus from visual communication to software development. Having learned coding as a kid myself, the opportunity to teach coding to kids in the same place where my own career as a software developer might have started felt incredibly rewarding.

Did you enjoy conducting the coding lessons?

Absolutely! Everyone involved was amazing, and I am grateful to each and every one of them.

What was your greatest takeaway from this teaching experience?

My biggest takeaway was gaining a hands-on understanding of the tremendous effort required to organize and deliver educational programs like this. From handling the logistics of online classes to preparing the lessons themselves, it involves a lot of work. However, seeing the kids enjoy and learn valuable skills that can empower them to navigate the challenges they face in life makes it all worth it.

How did the key aspects of the lessons you delivered relate to your job?

The most crucial aspect I tried to teach the kids was the abstract idea behind a computer program. In other words, I aimed to convey what a software program is and the fundamental concepts that underlie its purpose and functioning. At its core, a computer software is merely a list of well-defined steps that a computing machine executes in a specific order to respond to signals and provide results.