How I Went from Software Engineer to Kids' Coding Teacher

There’s a moment, about fifteen years into a career, when you stop and ask yourself: Is this really what I want to keep doing?

For me, that moment didn’t come during a dramatic burnout or an existential crisis. It came while watching a nine-year-old girl figure out, completely on her own, how to make a cat dance across a screen in Scratch. She was laughing. Actually laughing — at code. And I realized I hadn’t laughed at code in years.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start from the beginning.

The Developer Years

I spent over fifteen years as a professional software developer. I built websites, web applications, APIs. I worked in teams, I freelanced. I got comfortable with that particular rhythm of the tech world — the sprints, the deadlines, the constant learning of new frameworks that would be obsolete in eighteen months.

Don’t get me wrong. I loved programming. There’s a deep satisfaction in writing something that works, in solving a problem elegantly, in building something from nothing but logic and a text editor. Code was my craft, and I was proud of what I could build with it.

But somewhere along the way, the spark faded. The projects started blurring together. Another dashboard. Another login system. Another client who wanted “something like Airbnb but for dogs.” The creativity that had drawn me to programming in the first place got buried under layers of business requirements and technical debt.

The Unexpected Detour

So I did something that confused everyone around me. I stepped away.

I worked as a barista for a while. Yes, really. A software engineer pulling espresso shots. My former colleagues thought I’d lost it. But there was something I needed that code couldn’t give me at that point — human connection, working with my hands, slowing down enough to figure out what actually mattered to me.

It was behind that coffee counter that I started noticing kids. Families would come in, and I’d watch children draw on napkins, build towers out of sugar packets, invent games with whatever was around them. They were creating — constantly, fearlessly, without anyone asking them to justify a sprint velocity or write a ticket first.

That observation planted a seed.

Teaching Art, Cooking, and Then… Code

I started teaching art and cooking workshops for kids. Nothing fancy — just small groups, hands-on projects, lots of mess. And I discovered something surprising: I was good at it. Not because I was the world’s greatest artist or chef, but because I genuinely enjoyed watching kids figure things out.

Teaching kids is humbling. They don’t care about your resume. They don’t care that you once optimized a database query that saved a company thousands of euros. They care about whether the thing they’re making is fun, whether you’re actually listening to them, and whether they get to use the glitter glue.

After a few months of art and cooking, a thought started nagging me. I had this whole other skill set — fifteen years of it — that I wasn’t using. What if I could teach kids to code the same way I was teaching them to paint? Not as a job skill. Not as “preparation for the future economy.” But as a creative act?

The Aha Moment

The first time I sat down with a small group of kids and opened Scratch, I expected to teach. Instead, I learned.

I had prepared a careful, logical lesson plan. Step one, step two, step three. The way a developer would structure it. Clean. Efficient. Totally wrong.

Kids don’t learn code the way adults do. They don’t want to understand variables before they can make something move. They want to make something move right now, and then — maybe — they’ll ask why it moved. The learning is driven by curiosity and play, not by structure and theory.

That first session was chaos. Beautiful chaos. One kid made a character that just spun in circles forever and declared it “the best game ever made.” Another spent forty-five minutes choosing the perfect shade of purple for a background and didn’t write a single line of code. A third figured out loops before I even explained them, just by experimenting.

And that nine-year-old girl? She connected blocks in Scratch that I hadn’t even planned to cover. She made a cat respond to keyboard input, play a sound, and change color — all on her own. When the cat danced, she laughed. And I thought: This. This is what programming is supposed to feel like.

From Teacher to Professor to Founder

That experience set me on a new path. I kept teaching, kept refining my approach. Eventually, I became a tech professor at the French International School of Seoul, which gave me something invaluable: years of daily, structured experience teaching kids of all ages, from all backgrounds.

I taught elementary students who had never touched a computer. I taught teenagers who already knew more about TikTok algorithms than I did. I taught kids who spoke French at home, English at school, and Korean on the playground. Each one of them showed me something different about how young minds approach technology.

The pattern I kept seeing was this: when you remove the pressure and make coding a creative tool — like crayons or building blocks — kids don’t just learn it. They own it. They make it theirs. A seven-year-old doesn’t code because it’s a “21st-century skill.” She codes because she wants to make a unicorn fly across the screen and leave a trail of rainbows.

Why I Started C.Lab Academy

C.Lab grew out of a simple conviction: code isn’t a professional skill you learn for a future job — it’s a creative language you can use right now.

I founded C.Lab Academy here in Seoul because I saw a gap. There are plenty of coding academies that teach kids to program. Many of them are excellent at the technical side. But most of them approach coding the way my old industry approached it — as work. As preparation. As a means to an end.

At C.Lab, coding is the end. Or rather, it’s the beginning of something. When a child builds a game in Scratch, designs a character in Inkscape, programs a robot to navigate a maze, or writes their first JavaScript function — that’s not practice for some future career. That’s a real creative achievement, happening right now, and it deserves to be treated that way.

We keep our groups small — four to six students maximum. Not because it sounds good on a brochure, but because I’ve learned through years of teaching that this is where the magic happens. When you have four kids around a table, you can actually see the moment someone gets stuck, the moment someone has a breakthrough, the moment two kids start collaborating on something neither of them planned.

What I Wish Parents Knew

If you’re a parent reading this, here’s what I want you to know.

Your child doesn’t need to become a software engineer. The world has plenty of those. What your child does need is to know that they can take an idea in their head and make it real. Coding is one of the most powerful ways to do that. It’s a creative superpower, and kids pick it up with a speed and fearlessness that honestly puts most adults to shame.

I spent fifteen years writing code for clients, bosses, and deadlines. Now I get to watch kids write code for themselves — for fun, for curiosity, for the pure joy of making something that didn’t exist five minutes ago.

I’ve never been happier at work.

Come See for Yourself

C.Lab Academy offers programs for kids aged 3 to 16, from first steps in digital art to building real projects in JavaScript and robotics. If you’re in Seoul and curious, come say hi. I promise there will be no corporate jargon, no gamified progress bars, and absolutely no pressure.

Just a room full of kids making things — and one former software engineer who finally figured out what programming was for.

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Clément is the founder of C.Lab Academy, a coding and digital art academy for kids in Seoul, South Korea. He teaches in French and English and is still working on his Korean.