Since 2017, Saturday Kids has managed Code in the Community (CITC) – a large-scale free multi-level coding programme for disadvantaged kids.

With the help of public and private partners — including Google and Infocomm Media Development Agency (IMDA) — and over 1000 committed volunteers, we’ve reached over 3500 kids from disadvantaged families in Singapore.

The programme was delivered virtually aligned to the SMMs in the past year, but with the ease of restrictions in early 2022, we brought back the face-to-face course for Scratch and Python Level 2 classes which require hardware uses. While the online classes enabled learning continuity of CITC students during the pandemic, we are happy to bring back the face-to-face course through continued partnership with the National Library Board. 

In the video, we asked Code in the Community students and volunteers what they like about Code in the Community! 

Take a look at what they have said… 

Big thanks to all the students and volunteers who joined us and shared their answers!

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Code in the Community students, volunteers, parents as well as current and future partners gathered at Google APAC office on 23 May to celebrate the impact the programme made to date and to look ahead at the future of the programme. The event was organised by Saturday Kids, Google, Infocomm Media Development Agency (IMDA), in support of Digital for Life, and graced by the Guest of Honour, Ms. Rahayu Mahzam, Parliamentary Secretary, Ministry of Communications and Information and Ministry of Health.* 

With the help of public and private partners — including Google and IMDA — and over 1000 committed volunteers, CITC 1.0 (2017-2019) and CITC 2.0 (2020-2022) reached over 3500 kids from disadvantaged families in Singapore. As the CITC 2.0 programme is near completion, we are at a critical junction to call on partners across sectors to join forces to sustain and scale the essential learning opportunities for Singaporean children in need in coming years through CITC 3.0 (2023-2026). The demand for the programme has grown over time, evident from the enrolment waitlist as well as the number of partners engaged in the programme.

During the event, Neha Agarwal, CITC volunteer and Vice President at Citibank Singapore emphasised that “CITC imparts kids with programming skills but more than that it gives them hope. The hope for a bright future by giving them the experience of joy of technology.” 

To date, the programme has impacted the lives of thousands of CITC students in unique ways. Zia, who has been taking CITC Scratch and Python classes, shared that the programme sparked her interest in coding, and she now leads a robotics club at her school. Ian, another CITC student said the programme guided his decision to apply for School of Science and Technology as well as helped strengthen his portfolio needed for Direct School Admission for secondary school.

The student project exhibition exemplified not only the new skills the students gained through the programme but also their creativity, problem-solving skills, resilience and growth mindset which are all crucial to thrive in the rapidly changing 21st Century world we live in. 

Anthony, one of the students who exhibited the projects at the event, shared about a fall detection and notification tool, “XtraCare”, developed to give caretakers the ability to tend to and support the elderly when they fall or need support. 

In the partnership panel discussion, John Tan, Founder and Chairman of Saturday Kids, noted “What’s really important is that CITC is a platform for everyone to come together to provide kids with learning opportunities. It goes far beyond learning to code. The ability to learn how to learn, learning agility, is far more important.” 

Through CITC, Saturday Kids aims to realise a world where every kid is empowered with skills and mindset to purposefully apply the potential of technology to shape a better future.

Looking ahead to 2023 and more, Saturday Kids is seeking partners from the public and private sector, as well as community organisations to join forces to continue on with Code in the Community 3.0 to respond to the growing demand of the programme.

Reach out to Code in the Community at [email protected] for more information on how your organisation can join the CITC movement. 

Watch the highlight video from the event:

*Ms Rahayu Mahzam was promoted to Senior Parliamentary Secretary for Ministry of Health and Ministry of Law in June 2022.

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That may not sound like a big deal, but for a small, independent social enterprise that often feels like it’s struggling against a system, it’s a heckuva milestone. And you bet we’re not passing up a chance to celebrate it.

True to our ethos – we’ve tried a lot of new things, seen a lot of changes in the education landscape in Singapore and beyond, made lots of friends, found our critics, been inspired by amazing kids, played a lot, failed a lot, and learned a lot.

Here are just some highlights from our adventure so far:

Starting small and scrappy running popups out of our co-working space Found8 and any other locations we could get our hands on. (Read this account from one of our OG interns Sandra!)

Creating the kind of work environment we wanted to be a part of – flexible, family-friendly and remote-friendly, creatively chaotic and with an unlimited leave policy. (Go behind the scenes of what that looks like here.)

Moving into our first space at Bukit Timah Plaza – best known for having a disproportionately high number of tuition centres, maid agencies, and henceforth, a bright yellow fixture on the third floor.

Investing in a startup in Kazakhstan and taking a mini company fieldtrip to the country’s capital city Almaty.

Partnering 21C Girls and Ngee Ann Poly to pilot Project Empower, a programme to introduce girls to the basics of Artificial Intelligence.

Moving into our second space at Parkway Centre – also a bastion for tuition centres, where we were proud to stick out on the 10th floor.

Opening our first international office in Tokyo Japan in 2019, in the hipster neighbourhood of Nakameguro.

Launching the Pay it Forward fund, where donors co-sponsorspots for disadvantaged kids in our creative coding classes. To date, over 100 donors have funded the tech education of over 50 kids. All donations continue to be matched 1-1 by Saturday Kids. (Meet some of our Pay it Forward scholars here!)

Reaffirming our commitment as an organisation to social impact (as a social enterprise registered with raiSE) and play-based learning as we reevaluated our priorities as a team at the start of the pandemic. A process of collective soul-searching led to our new mission – to inspire kids to create a better future with the power of code.

Partnering impact-oriented corporates like EPAM, Skyscanner, LionsBot, Breathe Consulting and non-profits like Glyph, 6th Sense, and more, to run free coding workshops to democratise access to digital literacy, particularly for disadvantaged kids, through initiatives like CITCx. We look forward to expanding on this work until no child is left behind.

Launching products the market was not ready for, like Explorer Pass – which would go on to shape our ed-tech spin-off company Doyobi’s initial offerings.

Partnering our friends at EtonHouse Japan to launch Saturday Kids Unplugged in Karuizawa (an hour outside of Tokyo) – with the aim of getting kids excited about the wonders of the wilderness through freeplay in the great ourdoors. (Here’s a postcard from Karuizawa, written by former big kid Nicole.)

Receiving funding from Google to start Code in the Community, which would go on to become Singapore’s largest free programme for disadvantaged kids to learn how to code. (Check out the impact of CITC here!)

Meeting many, many awesome kids (and parents and educators) in Singapore, Cambodia, and Japan. (Learn more about our adventures teaching kids in Cambodia to code through our USAID project Coding Cats.)

Along the way, we’ve had a diverse tribe of curious, kooky, passionate big kids who’ve made all of this possible and inspired us to dream bigger, together. Working at Saturday Kids ain’t everyone’s cup of tea, but we’re grateful for the big kids, rocket launchers, interns, and volunteers who’ve found their happy place with us and shaped Saturday Kids into what it is today.

And the adventure’s only just begun.

We don’t know what the future holds – and perhaps that’s the best part.

10 years ago, we started out as Singapore’s first coding school for kids before spreading roots internationally, anchoring ourselves around a commitment to social impact and branching out into ed-tech.

What will we be doing in 10 years time? We only know this much: We’ll be going where the future leads – and that’s where kids meet the big questions, problems, and possibilities of the future.

For now, our team is hunkering down for the next season of creative coding camps and working towards the next iteration of Code in the Community.

As always, an adventure is more fun with friends; together we can do more, go further, and leave no child behind from the possibilities of tech. So don’t be a stranger, we’d love for you to get in touch.

If you’re a parent or child who’s had a memorable experience with us over the last 10 years – we’d love to hear from you! Shoot us an email or drop a comment on our Instagram to share your favourite Saturday Kids memory; as a lil’ ‘thank you’, we’re giving away $500 of Saturday Kids credits to one family (redeemable any time this year).

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Meet Louis Puah: a longtime friend of Saturday Kids whose interest and work at the intersection of the future of learning and the future synergise with our mission to get kids to learn how to learn so they can create a better future. An avid childhood gamer, Louis shares how his hobbies as a child and experience in school inspired him to found social enterprises Praxium and Crater as platforms to reinvent education and holistically empower students to navigate decisions around their careers.

What led you to what you do now?

“I like to play games and I’ve been playing games since I was four years old. Those were times you needed to type commands into the terminal to install games. Growing up, I’ve always liked tech, and thought it was cool, new, and interesting. 

But despite how I was into tech and games, there was no space for that in school. In the 90s and 2000s, tech was booming – so many things were becoming possible. Yet school was still obsessed with basic stuff like math and science homework – other interesting things were not considered.

“Mainstream school is largely the same as when I was growing up 20 years ago, but the world has changed so much.

I’m interested in the question of how we might evolve the education system and propel it forward. In a way, it’s about helping kids who might feel the way I did about school, now.”

If I’d been able to explore my interests in tech and games while in school back then, I’d have learned so much more and had a better experience.”

You said you got interested in tech because of your love for playing games. As an adult looking back now, how do you feel about the time you spent playing computer games?

“For me, games and tech were a medium of getting feedback and a response. What’s terrible for kids is not being engaged – to grow in a world where for much of the time, no one cares or responds to you. 

There are games that don’t encourage kids to build certain skills, or to become smarter, or to be more strategic; instead they reward kids for spending more time on their game. And that can be very unhealthy. 

But games can also teach kids some amazing skills. An example is Minecraft, which is interesting from an architectural standpoint. It can teach kids about community-building, and as kids build multi-player servers they can learn about hardware – how to maintain a server and keep it running. 

The kids who benefit the least are the kids who act as consumers who just log on and play the game. There’s not as much value created for themselves when they just do that.”

Could you share more about Praxium and Crater, the two future of work and learning social enterprises you created?

“I started Praxium to relook the education system, and questioning the purpose of education. We have to recognise that today you don’t need to go to a good school to land a good job, and we can bypass the mainstream education system and traditional routes to ‘success’, because those don’t work for every kid, and don’t recognise the diversity and richness the future of work has to offer.

Praxium is about enabling kids to understand different industries and jobs – but we don’t just tell them what a job is like, how much it pays, and how to get employed. We go further by letting students be privvy to the dynamics within a sector, and exposing them to the dilemmas someone working in a certain field might face.

“For example, someone working in finance might have to choose between serving a millionaire and a low-income person. The commission from the former is obviously much higher than the latter, but how might you reconcile that morally with the issue of rising inequality? “

Through Praxium we offer short-term programmes with schools, so the impact is limited. After a few days, kids’ focus returns to their day-to-day responsibilities like homework, and the possibility of an alternative reality is eroded by everyday pressures.

So Crater is about taking it a step further to work in deeper partnership with schools and educators. Many schools have under-utilised space and facilities. If those were shared with other organisations and communities, students can be exposed to alternative narratives and realities on a regular basis. Right now many schools have incredible hardware like maker spaces and accessible venues, but the burden for providing the software now falls entirely on the shoulders of teachers.

What we’re trying to do is to bring in people with diverse experiences that kids can benefit from to support teachers to offer students the software they need to navigate the future of work.”

How do you negotiate the tension between teaching kids how to negotiate the realities of the world as it is, while inspiring them to make it better?

“My fear is that kids receive the message that if things don’t exist, it’s because they’re not possible. That’s a dangerous worldview to carry.”

“So much of what kids think and believe and how they behave is mirrored in adults. That’s why upstream work is so important… so much of working with adults is about unlearning the harmful beliefs we learned as kids. 

If you believe that a programmer is more successful than a hawker, you’ll never believe in life beyond grades.

Every job has dignity and value – the fact that people are paid much less for some jobs than others is a problem to solve, rather than a situation to live with. We need to value all talents and skillsets. 

A kid from a less-privileged background who works part-time jobs after school, for example, is probably more mature than a kid from a wealthy family who’s never had to worry about money. Employers should recognise and value that.”

What is one message you want to send to the kids of today?

“Just have fun.

“The things you enjoy and are interested in are glimpses into what the future world needs. You will literally inherit the world.”

Just look at the Olympics – activities like e-sports, rock-climbing, skateboarding are things young people have been pushing for for a long time, and now they’re officially part of the games.

Every new trend is driven by young peoples’ obsessions and interests.

 In the past, people would never have imagined that Marvel comics would one day become movies. But the people who were kids in the 80s and 90s who grew up reading those comics became film directors, art directors, and consumers willing to spend money on this. 

The interests of young people always foreshadow what future trends will be.”

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