No matter how old we get, we can all agree: Adulting is hard, especially when you’ve lost any sense of how many days you’ve been in quarantine. From keeping track of bills to making sure you file your taxes on time, life admin is never ending and we kind of wish we’d had an adulting class to prepare us.
As New Jersey and most of the country hunkers down at home, there’s lots of talk about what we can be teaching our kids about real life, whether it be how to cook a meal, do laundry or help with yard work. As kids get older, those topics turn to things like personal finance and health insurance.
The good news: Code Academy is offering a free online class to teach teens about all that real life stuff. Called Non-Technical Life Skills, the course covers everything from personal finance, removing stains from clothing and filing for taxes to the basics on loan interest, how to pick a health insurance plan and how to use LinkedIn for networking and job-searching. The class even gets into how to have healthier relationships.
The course is a collection of topics Codecademy’s curriculum team wishes had been taught in public schools. It’s free to everyone, not just students, which means anyone who could use a refresher can take the class.
“We’re passionate about intersectional learning and our curriculum developers were excited to see how we could teach learners about life skills that don’t get taught in the core curriculum of schools but are still essential in the everyday,” Zach Sims, CEO and Co-Founder of Codecademy, told New Jersey Family.
Codecademy was founded on the same principle. “I started Codecademy after being frustrated while I was in college that most of my peers and I were learning skills that wouldn’t help us find jobs after we graduated.” Sims said. “I was interested in programming, but found it super difficult to learn. So I started teaching myself and decided that a few other people could stand to learn too. My co-founder and I started Codecademy nine years ago to connect millions of people to economic opportunity through online courses.”
Codecademy offers classes that teach coding languages, technical skills, and job-readiness. “Students can learn any of the world’s most popular coding languages including Python, JavaScript, Java, and C++, and apply them to build projects and achieve outcomes in software development, computer science, and data science,” Sims said.
In mid-March Codecademy announced a giveaway of 10,000 scholarships to support students and teachers impacted by the COVID-19 crisis. To date, the company has given away 80,000 scholarships.
To sign up for the free class, go to the Code Academy website.