Innovation and Creativity at Core of Learning Program Seeking to Engage High School Students and Increase STEM Interest
ORLANDO, Fla., Oct. 1, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- NoNameSite.com, the online community for math and critical-thinking games catering to students from 13 to 18 years of age, today announced the launch of a new series of 76 online learning modules geared to help kids compete in NoNameSite online competitions and challenges. Sponsored by and developed in partnership with DARPA, the School of Code (SoCo) is a program of unique new science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) interactive lessons designed to introduce youngsters to coding in a fun and creative process. Available at http://www.Nonamesite.com/soco, SoCo is an intuitive learning platform that makes a game out of learning to code through interactive lessons, scores, badges, and community recognition. Students with no programming experience are motivated to complete lessons and master programming basics. A simple, drag and drop interface makes the lesson easy to follow. Tasks and projects increase in difficulty as the students move deeper into the process of learning how to code. SoCo offers students a profile page to show personal statistics, badges, and achievements, sharing mechanisms for posting individual scores or lessons to social media and public forums for questions and community feedback.
"Given today's globalized access to knowledge and the rapid pace of technology development, our technological future depends on the innovation, agility and system-wide thinking of America's current and future students," said Rob Hughes, president and COO of TopCoder, Inc. "NoNameSite is uniquely geared towards supporting that mission through a core emphasis on delivering measureable results through the gamification of critical thinking activities such as SoCo."
About NoNameSite.com
Originally funded by DARPA, NoNameSite.com is a website built to help encourage and foster CS-STEM skills (STEM with a focus on Computer Science) for students from 13 to 18 years of age in the U.S. NoNameSite.com has eight (8) fun games, including the new drag and drop coding Ant-onomy game. NoNameSite.com offers big awards, contests, and has an additional feature called the "level editor" which allows the students to play the games and add their own levels to the games to share with friends. The site features a "create your own avatar" or "NoNameSite Zeepl" that allows students to customize their profiles. NoNameSite.com's new SoCo is a coding school that teaches students who are new to programming how to code.
About TopCoder, Inc.
TopCoder is the world's largest Open Innovation Community of digital creators with over 425,000 members representing algorithmists, software developers and creative artists from over 200 countries. The TopCoder Open Innovation Community creates digital assets including analytics, software and creative designs and solutions for a wide-ranging client base through a competitive, rigorous, standards-based methodology. Combined with our extremely talented community this groundbreaking methodology results in superior outcomes for our clients. For more information about sponsoring TopCoder events and utilizing TopCoder's software services and platforms, visit http://www.TopCoder.com.
NoNameSite.com is a registered trademark of TopCoder, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
Jim McKeown
TopCoder, Inc.
860.633.5540
jmckeown@topcoder.com