Ocean Tweedale was five when she decided to become a veterinarian, and not much older when she changed her mind. Her mother, Elizabeth Tweedale, kept thinking about why.
“She realized you actually have to deal with really sick pets,” Tweedale said. “The dream dissolved because the reality was sad, not just cuddly.”
A five-year-old revising an opinion is unremarkable. What Tweedale took from it was the version that does not get revised: the child who commits to an image of a job, never encounters the work, and carries the image forward until it quietly becomes the outer boundary of what they will consider.
Sociologists call the outcome identity foreclosure, which describes committing to an identity without having examined the alternatives. Applied to careers, it produces a sixteen-year-old who appears decisive and who has never seen a second option.
The window closes before secondary school
The OECD reported in its 2020 study Dream Jobs? that the career aspirations of seven-year-olds are already shaped by gender stereotypes and social background, and that they change very little by seventeen.
Education and Employers, a UK charity, asked more than 20,000 primary school children in 2018 what job they wanted and where they had heard about it. Fewer than one percent named someone who had visited their school. Television, social media and the occupations of family members accounted for nearly all of the rest.
Set against that, careers provision arriving in the final years of school is competing with a decade of accumulated impression, at the moment students are least able to reconsider anything.
“They don’t even start looking at life after graduation until they are 16 or 17,” she said. “By then, they are faced with an overwhelming paradox of choice and almost zero context.”
What school leaders reported
Before designing the Coco Coders curriculum, Tweedale’s team interviewed high school principals across the United States. Two problems came up repeatedly: students arriving without basic technical fluency, and students arriving with no working map of the professional world.
The second is the harder one to repair late, and it is the one the company built around.
Coding as a lens
The design choice at Coco Coders, which Tweedale founded in 2016, is to treat coding as a way of seeing infrastructure rather than as a vocational skill. A student who loves animals is rarely told that a regional shelter network runs on software somebody wrote, or that automated feeding systems are a design job. A student interested in cities is rarely told that traffic flow is an algorithmic problem with people employed to solve it.
The curriculum runs ten-week foundation blocks followed by four-week deep dives anchored on a real technology. An ocean conservation module studies Mr. Trash Wheel, the solar-powered device that intercepts debris in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, and then asks students to design their own response to the same problem.
“It’s saying, here was a problem, here was the solution. Now, what’s your idea?” she said.
Two doors into the same room
Tweedale studied computer science at a point when the room was mostly men who had been gaming and tinkering since childhood, and that head start operated as an unwritten entry requirement.
The curriculum offers two routes through identical material as a result. A student oriented toward mechanics works on game logic and back-end efficiency. A student oriented toward narrative builds the world and the interface. Both reach the same technical foundation, which is roughly how technology companies staff their teams.
About Coco Coders
Coco Coders is an online coding school founded in 2016 by Elizabeth Tweedale. It teaches Scratch, Python, HTML, CSS and JavaScript to school-age children through live interactive classes in group and private formats, and works with students in the United States, the United Kingdom and internationally. Course information is published at cococoders.com.
