This article was published on September 3, 2013

Treehouse gets included in Oregon school district’s curriculum, offering students programming courses


Treehouse gets included in Oregon school district’s curriculum, offering students programming courses

Treehouse has partnered with the Umatilla school district in Oregon, becoming perhaps the first edu-tech service to be included in a school’s curriculum. Through this relationship, students can elect to take programming courses starting this fall as part of their learning.

An online interactive education platform, Treehouse offers classes on learning HTML, Cascading Style Sheets, and other coding languages. In addition, students can gain skills in creative software like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, along with other current technical programs like WordPress. It recently began utilizing game mechanics in order to encourage people to use its service, following suit with what other startups like Codecademy is doing.

In Umatilla’s school district, Treehouse has been used before: teacher-nominated students were eligible this summer to participate in these trial programs.

This marks a major achievement for Treehouse. Company CEO Ryan Carson tells us that it hasn’t been an easy goal to reach:

We’ve seen numbers that say as few as 5% of American schools have computer science classes — and all indications are it’s a number that is smaller now than it was in the 70s. We’ve been trying to connect to schools to show them that their students need to learn to program. It’s a given that computing will be a required skill for work as we progress through the 21st century.

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Since its founding in 2012, Treehouse has seen some fascinating growth — it is seeing more than $3.6 million in revenue and is used by over 20,000 users.

See related: Is technology the ‘Superman’ that the education sector has been waiting for?

Photo credit: David McNew/Getty Images

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