About Coding Deciphered
Overview
Coding Deciphered offers coding classes for kids 8 – 15 years old in the Gaston County, NC area including Belmont, Cramerton, Gastonia, Lowell, McAdenville, and Mount Holly. Our mission is to inspire future innovators through fun classes where kids feel like they are playing while parents know their children are learning valuable skills.
Community Impact
An essential part of our mission is to give back to the local community. We do this by offering free classes at libraries, public schools, and local non-profit organizations. During COVID, we held numerous free, online sessions for elementary and middle school students. Your child’s attendance at our paid events directly supports these free community outreach initiatives.
Deb Alzner
I am an Information Technology professional specializing in data architecture and data analytics. I work as a data architect for a large healthcare organization and I have over 25 years of computer programming experience.
I am passionate about providing kids with computer programming experience at an early age. I feel very fortunate that I was exposed to computer programming starting in third grade and I credit my technology career to this early exposure. Given that technology pervades our daily lives, children’s future success will increasingly depend on their ability to creatively leverage technology.
My experience working with kids includes teaching “Girls Who Code”, “Hour of Code”, and Scratch programming at local schools, various Gaston County venues, virtually through Zoom, and to my own children. In addition, I coached Girls on the Run and served as a classroom tutor. When I am not thinking in code, you can find me hiking Crowders Mountain, playing piano, reading, shuttling my two children to activities, and trying to convince them to converse with me in German during the car rides. See below for the story behind Coding Deciphered.
The Story Behind Coding Deciphered
When my oldest child entered third grade and mentioned how much she liked computer lab, I excitedly asked her what she was learning. As I prepared to listen to her answer, I fondly remembered first being exposed to computers in third grade and learning how to use BASIC to produce images on the computer screen. When my daughter answered that she was playing games to learn reading and math, I felt a surge of disappointment. Yes, reading and math are incredibly important, but I also wanted her to experience the thrill of being able to tell a computer what to do and watch the results of her commands unfold on the screen. It baffles me that I was exposed at such an early age decades ago, but my children have not had that same opportunity.
Over the next several years I searched high and low for opportunities to expose my children to computer programming and technology. Every opportunity I found was a great distance away, quite expensive, “one week and done,” and/or my kids were "spoon fed" code without understanding what the code was doing. I am working to change that picture in our community. I have been hosting computer programming sessions at a variety of venues for the past few years and am now working on taking these classes to the broader community. I would love your child to benefit from the knowledge I have to share. While creating fun games, your children will learn about key programming concepts such as loops, conditional statements, variables, simple algorithms, debugging, and one of the most important things in today’s world – how to stay safe on the internet. They will feel like they are playing. In reality, they will be learning. Win-Win!