Defunct DevKids is now uLesson Coding School

Johnstone Kpilaakaa -

“DevKids is now uLesson Coding School and it’s so much more than a name change,” reads a tweet by uLesson Coding School on the 3rd of March 2022.

Last November, we exclusively reported that uLesson has discontinued DevKids, its online coding classes for kids. However, the report also stated that “Devkids may or may not come back.”

The last paragraph of the report stated that “whether this [the discontinuing of DevKids] is the death knell of DevKids or a moratorium to restructure the product remain to be seen. We’ll keep you updated as the story develops.”

Three months after its last tweet, the defunct DevKids tweeted with an image that read, “DevKids is now uLesson Coding School. Different name. Same mission. Even better,” to signify the return of the live coding classes for kids — between the ages of 4 to 18.  

Few weeks after an internal memo instructed the tutors that “we [uLesson] are pulling the plug on DevKids,” the edtech startup raised a $15 million Series B fund, arguably the largest disclosed investment in Africa's ed-tech ecosystem as at the time of this report.

Following the funding, Sim Shagaya, uLesson's founder and CEO told TechCrunch that even though DevKids was rolled back, “uLesson is making efforts to re-introduce the feature — which started as an experiment in teaching kids how to code and at some point made 30% of the company’s revenues  — into the uLesson platform in 2022.”

The previously deactivated sign up button on the website has been re-activated and live classes have also resumed. uLesson Coding School is currently available to all kids residing in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South-Africa, UK and US.

Since its launch, the uLesson app has 2 million downloads, over 12.3 million videos have been watched, with 25.6 million questions answered on the platform, according to the company. In 2021, daily average users surged 430%, and live lesson demand grew by 222% since their introduction in September.