CodeHS Wins Innovation Challenge at Education Nation

Zach & Jeremy’s excellent adventure continues.  Today CodeHS won the Innovation Challenge at Education Nation.  CodeHS takes home a $75,000 prize from Robin Hood Foundation–and publicity worth a lot more than that!
CodeHS helps high school students start programming.  The site provide short instructional videos, programming exercises, and help from real people.
NewSchools Venture Fund supported the annual Innovation Challenge.  See CNBC commentator Jim Cramer’s critique of the CodeHS pitch: 


Jim Cramer on Code HS from NBC News on Vimeo.
Co-founders Zach Galant and Jeremy Keeshin started coding in high school and served as computer science TAs while undergrads at Stanford.  CodeHS was incubated by ImagineK12 in 2011.
In July, we asked Experts to weigh in on K-12 coding & Computer Science Resources and featured CodeHS.  Rob Hutter, Managing Partner at Learn Capital, said, “As investors, we’re big believers in CodeHS — they use a special Javascript framework that Stanford University students have been using to learn computer science for years and have tuned it for K12 to let kids make games and other high interest interactions.  But since it’s based on one of the most popular object-oriented languages in the real world, CodeHS skills have high transfer to genuine coding tasks.  Also it’s getting great traction in schools because it’s built for the K12 market.”
 
CodeHS is a portfolio company of Learn Capital where Tom is a partner