Educator aims to instill a love of coding among young Las Vegans

Jeremy Bruner is not your average teacher.

All his class materials fit in a bright blue box, which he carries to wherever his class happens to be that day. Usually it's a spare room in the library, but on Mondays it’s a tiny room tucked inside the office of a Henderson medical consultant.

His handful of pupils are ushered through the door by their parents at around 6 p.m. Though they are a diverse mix of ages and backgrounds, they all come to learn something they aren’t normally taught in school: coding.

A former Clark County School District teacher, Bruner, 35, was inspired to form his own education startup after a trip to the South by Southwest festival in 2013. There he watched a 13-year-old unveil a smartphone app he had programmed himselves.

“I started thinking, ‘He can’t be the only 13-year-old capable of doing these things,’” Bruner said. “And I thought, ‘What if there were programs out there that would provide that type of guidance?’”

The result was TechBrainiacs, with Bruner as the sole employee. Formed last fall, the company took off in December after Bruner did a few free coding workshops. Now he teaches five classes a week.

The classes are aimed at giving young kids like Adam Gouchner, 7, a better understanding of the technology they have grown up with and use on a daily basis.

If he wasn’t sitting in Bruner’s class, Adam’s mom, Lore, said he would likely be at home watching astronomer Neil Degrasse Tyson or playing Minecraft, a sandbox video game popular with many young kids.

Lore pays the $30 for each class because she, like many other parents, have answered the passionate rallying cry in favor of STEM education. Citing a shortage of workers in high-tech fields, schools across the country are spending millions to teach young kids the fundamentals of science, engineering and technology.

Last December, hundreds of schools participated in the Hour of Code, an online movement that challenged students to write their own computer programs.

“Computer skills are the wave of the future,” she said. “Coding is so important. It seems like everything is connected to it.”

Some of Bruner’s classes involve hands-on work with computers, while others are “unplugged” in order to first teach kids the fundamentals. Instead of boring lectures and dry worksheets, Bruner tries to bring the complexity of coding to ground level.

In one lesson, he demonstrates the concept of error detection and correction, a basic process by which computers detect problems, through a clever use of playing cards.

He doesn’t expect every student to go on to be a programmer, but says they will walk away with valuable problem solving and critical thinking skills. He thinks technology is a good vehicle to teach the skills because kids are already accustomed to using things like computers and smartphones.

“They’ve used technology for so long and it’s been such a pervasive part of their life that they don’t have any intimidation factor,” Bruner said. “They’re willing to click buttons and work through the problem that way.”

Kids in the classes are often fidgety and tired after a full day of traditional school, but Bruner insists on running a tight ship. In a class where parents pay by the session, he can’t afford to allow disruptions.

The small class sizes, around 10 kids per session, allow him to work one on one with each student.

“This is absolutely a full-time job” he said. “When you consider having to make fliers, sales calls and send emails, the teaching itself is actually the best and the easiest part of the job.”

The next step for TechBrainiacs is expanding to more than just young kids, Bruner said. He would like to eventually teach coding to high schoolers as well as adults. This summer, Bruner is partnering with Bricks 4 Kidz to offer day camps centered on learning skills like coding and animation using Legos and video games like Minecraft.

“I get to be in a room and tell kids how video games are made,” Bruner said. “It’s the greatest thing in the world.”