Our Mission

“Every day I wake up knowing I have the skills and knowledge to change the world. My passion is to inspire and teach the next generation the problem solving and programming skills they need to be successful.”

Barbara Walters, President of Vanbara

As professional programmers, we express our creativity through our work, through technology. We love what we do and want to share our knowledge with students everywhere, so we created Bavel Blocks. Bavel Blocks is an on-line programming environment that teaches programming principles and techniques and at the same time provides opportunity for students to express their creativity through technology.

“The whole limit in the system is just that there just aren’t enough people who are trained and have these skills today.” Mark Zuckerberg

To analyze problems and create solutions, to learn new skills independently, and to be able to code are considered the most desired skills by employers. Millions of jobs require these skills and they will become even more important in the future. Still, few schools offer the opportunity to learn to code, so we decided to address that problem. We combine our programming environment with video instruction so it’s available to students everywhere. All that’s needed is a web browser and access to the internet.

“I could either watch it happen or be a part of it.” Elon Musk

For the last five years, we volunteered at a number of schools and organizations such as TechGirlz, Girl Scouts and Coding Dojo. We led programming clubs and summer camps. We tried a variety of tools to teach programming and for a variety of reasons found them lacking and not a lot of fun.

We wanted a rich, enjoyable environment for children to learn to program and express their creativity. It had to be fun. It had to be available everywhere. And it needed to produce programs that would run anywhere.

That’s why we built Bavel Blocks.

Meet the Bavel Blocks Team

Barbara Walters

Barbara Walters

President

Barbara has many years of computing experience and has contributed at all levels of hardware and software development. Her background experience includes processor design, multiple operating systems, networks, distributed file systems, and scalable applications. Her volunteer activity has provided valuable teaching experience and her professional problem-solving skills guided the learning-is-fun primus of the Bavel Blocks environment.

Vicki Jones

Vicki Jones

Vice President

Vicki is a computer performance analyst and programmer with many years of experience in designing and building software systems: distributed, secure, and scalable. In her PhD research and work as a Professor of Computer Science she developed database systems with efficient access controls for the burgeoning World Wide Web/Internet. She shares her passion for creative problem solving in science and engineering with her children, their friends and classmates, and anyone who will listen!