Programming board game raises 50% of its funding goal in 10 hours.

The Kickstarter campaign for Code Monkey Island - a board game that teaches children how to code - raised over 50% of it's $15,000 funding goal within 10 hours of its launch yesterday.

The campaign earned the cover story position on Metro NY that morning, and is on track to meet its goal well before the 30-day funding period is over.

In Code Monkey Island, players must get all of their monkeys safely across the "island" by using real programming concepts like conditional statements, loops, Boolean logic and operators, assignment and mathematical operations, and even data structures.

"I started working on Code Monkey Island for one reason: learning how to program changed my life, and it's changing the world around us, too," says Sidhu. "I wanted to take concepts that stumped me in college and present them in a way that anyone of any age could understand." Computer programming literacy is attracting serious discussion on a global scale as the number of high-paying tech jobs increases worldwide. By 2020, the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that of the 1.4 million tech-related jobs created in that year, only 30% could be filled by Americans given the U.S.' current curriculum. England is on track to become the first country in the world to make programming part of the core curriculum for primary and secondary school students, while only 1 out of 10 schools in the U.S. offers programming courses for young students.

With Code Monkey Island, Sidhu hopes to help kids stay ahead of the curve, both in the classroom and out. He plans to develop more board games that focus on teaching different aspects of programming to different age groups, from foundational games that teach young children how to conceptualize and execute basic operations, to more advanced games that teach older kids more complex and powerful concepts used in app development.

To learn more about Code Monkey Island, please visit https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rajsidhu/code-monkey-island-making-programming-childs-play.

BOILERPLATE

Code Monkey Games, LLC, was founded by designer and developer Raj Sidhu in April 2014. The company's first game, Code Monkey Island, teaches children ages 8 and up how to apply real programming concepts used by real programmers. Sidhu plans to release two more games in this series of educational board games, which will teach different aspects of programming to different age groups.

Please contact Raj at raj@codemonkeyplanet.com.