How young is too young?
Six is our floor and it is a real floor rather than a marketing one. Below that, most children do not yet have the reading and mouse control to get value from a ninety-minute session, and the honest advice is to wait a year. At six to eight the work is a game with rules the child can change, and the aim is that making a computer do something feels normal to them rather than remarkable.
My child already does blocks at school. Is this the same thing?
It starts in the same place and it does not stay there. Blocks are an excellent on-ramp and a poor destination, because a block cannot be misspelled and rarely produces a readable error, so a child never meets the two experiences programming actually consists of. We introduce small amounts of typed Python from around eight or nine, alongside the blocks rather than instead of them, so the transition is not experienced as a demotion later.
Can you teach after school?
No, and the reason is arithmetic rather than preference. Our teachers are in India, nine and a half to ten and a half hours ahead of the Bahamas depending on the season, so four in the afternoon in Nassau is half past two in the morning at their end. We will not staff that. Weekend mornings are the main offer and they suit most families here better anyway.
How much does it cost?
A group batch of five to eight students is USD 100 a month and one to one teaching is USD 150 a month, billed in US dollars, the same flat figures everywhere outside India. There is no enrolment fee, no annual contract, and the first class is free without a card.
Would one to one be better for a young child?
Usually not, which is the opposite of what most families expect. At this age a good deal of the learning comes from hearing five other children attack the same problem badly before somebody gets it right, and a child alone with a teacher misses all of that. One to one is the right answer for a specific reason, such as a weekday morning slot or a learning need, and those reasons are set out on their own page.
What if my child loses interest?
Then we would rather you stopped than kept paying. There is no minimum term and no enrolment fee, so stopping costs you the month you are in. What we do first is change the project rather than the child: nearly every case of a bored nine year old we have seen was a child working on somebody else's idea, and letting them choose something they can check the answer to fixes it more often than not.
Do the classes involve any screen-free work?
Some, deliberately. A good deal of early computational thinking is arguing about the order of steps, predicting what a program will do before running it, and explaining out loud why something failed. None of that needs a screen and all of it transfers. For younger children it is also a useful break in the middle of ninety minutes.
Will my child put anything online?
Not at this age without you knowing. Older students keep a public GitHub repository because that is the asset the whole programme builds toward, and for anybody under eighteen the rules are firm: no personal information, no photographs, no real names of other people, and a parent aware of the account. For a six or eight year old the work usually stays private entirely.
How do we know if it is working?
A written note each month in plain English, and the thing itself. By the end of the first quarter a child should be able to show you something they made and tell you what each part does, which is a far better test than any grade we could invent. If they can show it and not explain it, we would treat that as our problem to fix.
What happens after we send the form?
A mentor telephones you at a Bahamian hour to arrange the free session. Nothing is charged and no card is requested. Sending the form starts a conversation rather than an enrolment and reserves no place. Which entry point suits your child, and which weekend slot, are settled on that call before money comes up.
