Using this portal

1. What this covers

These terms cover this portal — the website your family signs in to. The wider agreement about the programme, fees and cancellation is the enrolment agreement you accepted when you joined; where the two overlap, the enrolment agreement wins.

By signing in, or by setting up an account with an invite code, you agree to what is on this page.

2. Accounts

• A parent or guardian sets up the family account. Where a learner is under 18, that has to be an adult.
• Learners may have their own sign-in so they can open lessons and send work. Their account cannot see anything about payments.
• Keep your password to yourself. You are responsible for what happens under your login. Tell us straight away if you think someone else has it.
• Invite codes are for the family they were issued to, work once, and expire after 30 days.
• Give us accurate details, and tell us when they change — a wrong email address means a parent who never hears that their child’s work was reviewed.

3. The lesson material

Every lesson PDF, worksheet and example in this portal remains our intellectual property. It is licensed to you for the personal, non-commercial use of the enrolled learner.

Please do not share, resell, republish or hand our material to other families, schools or centres. If you would like to use it at a school or an aftercare centre, we run partnerships for exactly that — just ask.

4. Work your child uploads

• It belongs to your child. Uploading it does not transfer ownership to us.
• You give us permission to store it and show it to our staff, so a coach can write feedback on it. That is the whole purpose.
• We will not publish it anywhere public without asking you first — see the privacy policy.
• Upload the learner’s own schoolwork, and nothing else. Do not upload other people’s photographs, anything unlawful, or anything that could harm the portal.
• Files are limited by type and size. Photographs, PDFs and zipped project files are accepted; other formats are refused.

5. Availability

We aim to keep the portal running at all times, and it is built so a failure of the email service or a scheduled job never stops a learner opening a lesson.

That said, this is a small business’s software running on third-party infrastructure. There may be short interruptions for maintenance or because a provider has a bad day. Where it is going to be down for any meaningful period, we will tell you on WhatsApp.

A lesson is never lost because the portal was down. If you cannot reach a week you should have, message us and we will send it to you directly.

6. Fair use

Please do not:

• Try to reach another family’s information, by any means.
• Probe, scan or test the portal’s security without our written permission.
• Automate access — scripts, scrapers, bulk downloading of lesson material.
• Upload anything designed to damage the portal or the people who use it.

We may suspend an account that does any of these while we work out what happened. If you have found a genuine security problem, please tell us — we would much rather hear it from you.

7. Suspension and closing an account

We may suspend or close a portal account where the enrolment has ended, where this page has been seriously breached, or where there is abusive behaviour toward our staff.

You can close your account at any time by asking us. Note that closing the portal account is not the same as cancelling the programme — cancelling is a separate step.

8. Certificates

A learner who completes every week of a course gets a Certificate of Achievement in the portal.

It recognises completion of our programme. It is not accredited by SAQA, Umalusi, the Department of Basic Education or any other South African education authority, and it is not a formal qualification. We would rather say so here than have anyone find out later.

9. Limits

We provide the portal and its content in good faith and take real care over both.

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for problems with your own device or internet connection, for third-party software used in lessons (Scratch, Python, a web browser), or for anything arising from how skills learned here are used elsewhere.

Where we are found liable for something connected to this portal, our total liability is limited to the fees you paid us in the three months before the claim arose. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, and nothing here limits your rights under the Consumer Protection Act.

10. Changes

We may update these terms — for instance when the portal gains a feature. The current version is always on this page with its date. Where a change matters to you, we will tell you rather than rely on you re-reading it.

11. Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of the Republic of South Africa, and the South African courts have jurisdiction.

12. Contact

William du Plooy, The Kids Are Coding, Durban, KwaZulu-Natal. WhatsApp 069 009 6569, email william@thekidsarecoding.com.