Computing and AI
Computing rewards shipped things. Maths strong enough for the theory, and a public trail of software that exists — projects people can run, contributions people can see, problems actually solved. It is the one path where a teenager can hold work indistinguishable in kind from a professional's, which also means the absence of any work is conspicuous.
How old is your child?
Move from tutorials to problems. A real project someone else uses — a tool for the family, a bot for a hobby, a website for a club. Start the maths seriously: it decides how far the computing can go. First competitions belong here.
What most families do instead.
Most families buy a coding class, watch the certificate arrive, and stop. Certificates from coding academies are the participation trophies of this path — admissions and employers look straight past them to whether anything was actually built. Course-completion is not a portfolio.
What the record looks like after two years on this path.
- Four to six finished projects of increasing ambition, with the broken versions kept in
- One thing other people actually used, however small the audience
- Maths assessment levels tracked twice a year, because maths is the ceiling
- A competition entered — olympiad, hackathon, coding contest — with the result recorded whatever it was
Projects that finish
Cora takes a young person from vague idea to working thing, and keeps the version that did not work — the part every interviewer asks about.
The maths, watched
Adaptive maths assessments, twice a year, because maths is what decides how far this path goes.
Show meCompetitions and hackathons
Informatics olympiads, coding contests and hackathons matched to age and country, deadlines live.
Show meCamps and programmes
Serious summer programmes and university outreach schemes, found by what they actually teach.
Show meSomeone in the industry
A working engineer who will look at what your child built and say what they would do differently.
Show meA portfolio that already exists
By the time anything is applied for, the work is documented, dated and exportable.
What to do this month.
- 1
Pick one small real problem in your household and have your child build the thing that solves it, with Cora guiding from idea to finished.
- 2
Run the maths assessment. Computing forgives many gaps; maths gaps it does not.
Sign up and the first conversation already knows the direction. The plan Cora builds is aimed at it from day one.
A path your child has not chosen will not survive the work. We build toward the direction you have in mind by getting your child genuinely interested in it — that is not a softer version of the goal, it is the only version that arrives.
And if they change direction at sixteen, the record survives it. Finishing things, building things, working with people — the evidence transfers.