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12 Hartford Business Journal • November 5, 2018 • www.HartfordBusiness.com By Sean Teehan steehan@hartfordbusiness.com T he sleek color design, co-working layout and Cornhole board give a new Farmington coding school the feel of a Silicon Valley startup. That makes sense, considering that theCoderSchool franchise originated in Palo Alto, Calif. Chirayu and Vaishali Shah officially opened the extracurricular K-12 ven- ture in mid-October. The husband/ wife duo are bullish about their pros- pects, and it looks like they have rea- son to be. During their first week, 52 students enrolled for courses — 100 signups within a year is considered a success, Vaishali said. "We're essentially the first in the Hartford area … to offer coding-school services for kids," Chirayu said. "There are some competitors located in Fair- field County, but they're a good hour away." TheCoderSchool's once-a-week classes for school-age children will fill a void in Connecticut, which is compet- ing with other nearby states to grow its technology talent base, particularly younger workers with coding skills, said Bruce Carlson, outgoing CEO of the Connecticut Technology Council (CTC), a statewide tech trade associa- tion. Connecticut schools — especially under- resourced ones — are behind the curve in teach- ing coding, which will continue to be a pivotal skill in the future job market, Carlson said. In 2016, there were nearly 16,600 jobs for software and web developers in Connecticut, according to state De- partment of Labor data. That number is expected to increase more than 23 percent by 2026, Labor Department projections show. Carlson said there is interest among state education and other officials to require coding classes at all schools but nothing has been formalized. A key challenge is that Connecticut already has a full curriculum, and no- body's figured out how to incorporate coding lessons into the school day. "I would say that at the state level, the Department of Education recognizes the need, but hasn't figured out how to then implement based on that," Carlson said. "We can be cheerlead- ers, but there just isn't enough time in the day to make it happen." TheCoderSchool's success will likely hinge on how well students develop their coding skills, Carlson said. And results depend on how individual franchises are run, according to the corporate chain's founder and chief executive. Hansel Lynn started theCoderSchool with Chief Operations Officer Wayne Teng just over four years ago. Both have experience working at high-profile tech companies. Lynn previously worked at Nuance Communications, which provid- ed the speech-recognition engine used by Apple's Siri, and Accenture. Teng is an alum of Oracle, TRW Space & Defense and Cambridge Technology Partners. Both are longtime techies, but, like the Shahs and many owners of the approxi- mately 20 franchises around the country, neither has formal experience in educa- tion. But a previous venture gave Lynn a fair amount of experience teaching kids. "I used to own a franchise … called School of Rock that taught kids how to play rock music," Lynn said. "So, a lot of that experience in how to teach kids in an afterschool activity, certainly influ- enced how theCoderSchool came about." The idea is to get children comfortable with coding early on. It's a skill that has its own languages — such as Scratch, which is geared toward children; and Python, a more advanced coding users must learn that requires a specific type of problem-solving thinking. Much like language-learning, the malleable brains of children are quick- er to pick up coding than, say, a 20- or 30-year-old or even a college student. Coding facilitates the creation of any- thing from a simple computer game featuring a cartoon character to a game-changing app, like Uber. That's why theCoderSchool allows franchises to formulate their own specific curricula, Lynn said. Franchises all have access to a "toolbox," and are expected to teach to the appropriate Silicon Valley East New Farmington coder school aims to build Greater Hartford's future tech workforce In-demand computer-coding careers Connecticut had 48,984 computer-related jobs in 2016, a number that is expected to grow 12.1 percent by 2026. Here's a breakdown of in-demand coding-related jobs: Occupation 2016 jobs 2026 projected jobs % increase Software developers, applications 9,492 12,275 29.3% Software developers, systems software 5,237 6,033 15.2% Web developers 1,870 2,153 15.1% Source: CT Dept. of Labor BUILDING CONNECTICUT'S WORKFORCE PIPELINE HBJ PHOTOS | SEAN TEEHAN Vaishali Shah (left) and her husband Chirayu Shah opened Connecticut's first theCoderSchool in Farmington, which provides extracurricular coding lessons to school-age children. TheCoderSchool is a Silicon Valley-based franchise.