"Initially when we created the first online set of courses there were people within days of us releasing it using it overseas, without us really doing much, and once someone wrote about us or put us on some list of similar products that were coming out at that same stage, that enabled to see us and start trying Code Avengers."
Six hundred schools in 30 countries are now working with the Code Avengers. Students are taught to make apps, games and web sites, and many continue learning after they have finished the programme, setting them up for a career in the growing information technology sector.
Bird said the Code Camps teach them a range of other skills as well, which would be applicable to a wide range of pursuits.
"They learn to work together as a group, but they're taking the computational thinking skills of coding, and learning how to do that away from a computer," said vice president of sales and marketing for Code Avengers, Daniel Bird, who works from the US for the now firmly international organisation.
"It's a way to engage a parent that coding is something they want their child to be involved in. At the end of the Code Camp the parents come up and give a talk about how their child has changed since beginning the Code Camp, from two to five days ago."
Students at the camps often make new friends and keep those relationships after they leave.
Bird spoke of the example of a 17-year-old who attended a camp in Saudi Arabia, who at the start said he was only attending because his mother made him go.
At the end of the programme, he needed to leave one and a half hours early because of another class, but when he started saying his goodbyes to the other students in the programme, he found himself unable to leave on time. The friendships he had built and the advice that he now had the ability to give to other students meant he took an hour to make it out the door.
The young man's parents said the Code Camp had helped him to develop socially in addition to acquiring new skills.
"We do provide the students with the opportunity to lead, to bring their skills to the Code Camp and to share the skills that they are learning," said Bird.
The camps allow students studying English to potentially have the same coding ability as one studying mathematics, Bird added, allowing them to do such things as make a web site to provide context to their academic learning.
"The Code Camps have a great ability in a country or an area, or a state in the US, to launch the coding initiative in that area," said Bird.
"It's a great way to keep learning happening for a student in the coming holidays. If run during the summer, they are an anchor point. It gets them refocused; it gets them analysing. It's a great way for schools that already have coding in the curriculum - a Code Camp is one of the things that may help a school attract prospective students."
From 2018, the New Zealand Government will make coding compulsory in the school curriculum from primary school level.
