A dozen teenagers are crouched over laptops in a glass-front apartment near one of Singapore’s busier MRT lines on a muggy Tuesday night. The screens are projected onto a wall so that everyone can watch each other’s code run, break, and then run again. No script is being adhered to. There is no recorded video that pauses for inquiries. This is the fundamental concept of Virtuosity Center’s new Live Coding Labs, a minor but significant change in the city-state’s approach to teaching programming to its youth.
There have always been coding schools in Singapore. You’ll probably come across a Coding Lab store, a location of The Lab Singapore, or an Empire AI campus promoting Python classes for tweens if you stroll through any mall. Here, the format is different. Students at Virtuosity Center code together, in real time, with an instructor explaining decisions aloud and debugging in front of the class rather than behind a curtain, as opposed to working through set modules at their own pace.
It seems like a minor adjustment. Most likely it isn’t. The difference between watching someone else solve a problem and solving one yourself under pressure while others watch is evident to anyone who has attempted to learn to code from a tutorial. It appears that Virtuosity Center is wagering that teens learn more quickly when they make mistakes in public rather than privately. The center seems to be attempting to replicate the enthusiasm of a hackathon on a weekly basis instead of just once a year.
The teenagers themselves appear to react to it, at least the ones who are open to conversing in between sessions. While working on a partially completed game project, a sixteen-year-old revealed that although she had taken coding classes since she was eleven, she had never had to explain her ideas to a group of people. It’s a minor detail, but it’s important. When taught traditionally, coding can be a very solitary skill. The learning process is altered when it is made social, even if it is only slightly competitive.
This is not taking place in a vacuum. Since 2020, the Infocomm Media Development Authority’s Code for Fun program has been promoting computational thinking in government schools. Beginning in 2025, it integrated AI for Fun modules that addressed prompt engineering and generative AI. Private centers have had to keep up, and “live” formats seem to be one strategy operators are using to stand out in a rapidly crowded market.
It’s still unclear if the live-lab model scales well. It’s unclear how well group debugging holds up with thirty students or whether quieter, less self-assured teens are squeezed out of the spotlight, but it works well with twelve. Since performance and tangible outcomes—Olympiad medals, DSA portfolios, competition trophies—are already central to Singapore’s tuition culture, there’s a chance that “live” will just serve as another stage for anxiety rather than confidence.
Even so, there’s a real difference in the room when you watch one of these sessions take place. It doesn’t feel staged, with teenagers debating whether loops are more efficient than recursion and laughing when someone’s code throws an error in the middle of a demo. Compared to how coding is typically taught to children, it feels more like the messy real-time work that programmers actually do in offices.
If nothing else, Virtuosity Center has found that this generation learns in public, aloud, and somewhat exposed. How well it endures after the novelty wears off will probably determine whether that becomes the new standard throughout Singapore’s coding-school landscape or just one center’s unique flavor.
