Back in January of 2014, Alexandra Diracles, Melissa Halfon and Leandra Tejedor met at Startup Weekend EDU in New York City. The trio went on to win the hackathon that weekend, having created a prototype that uses video as a medium to get teens excited about coding.
That prototype has since grown from an app into a full-fledged company. Vidcode officially launched a year after the hackathon, raising $32,000 through a Kickstarter campaign in late 2014. Over the course of two years, the company also worked with over 300 teen girls in New York City, testing the platform to cater specifically to this demographic.
The company differentiates itself from other interactive coding outlets like Codecademy and Treehouse in that it's specifically aimed at teens. As such, Vidcode’s architecture offers a nuanced alternative to where a teen ages 11-18 was traditionally learning to code. While other coding schools are effective at teaching students coding basics, Vidcode’s approach is more hands-on, and appeals to teens by having them create digital projects in a space they’re already interested in.
Vidcode integrates coding into creating and sharing photos and video, giving the social media-loving teen set a convenient and fun outlet to code in. This month, Vidcode even partnered with Snapchat to create a geofilter contest and launched a Pokemon augmented reality game builder.
“For a lot of online programming schools, coding isn’t social. But that isn’t the way programming works in real life,” said Vidcode co-founder Leandra Tejedor. “People program in pairs and there is a community around coding. And while we founded the company to hook girls on coding, we want to encourage teens of all genders to creatively code.”
Today, over 100,000 students now use the platform to learn how to code, 60 percent of which are girls. Vidcode is also being used in over 500 classrooms nationally.
Last week, Vidcode graduated from Y-Combinator's Summer 2016 cohort. Looking ahead, the company is working on projects surrounding virtual reality, as it’s primary focus is to expand its overall content offerings.
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