By Adam Gault | Harrow News | January 24, 2023 Vol. 87; Page 16

Brian Aspinall has travelled the world sharing his love of coding and computational thinking as an educator and a keynote speaker. But for this Harrow native, his passion for technology began right here in a classroom at Harrow District High School.

“Mrs. Boudreau let me create a school project that involved building a website in the 90’s, said Aspinall. “I was a self taught coder.”

Since then, Aspinall has spent more than two decades as a STEM educator, working as an elementary school teacher, an instructor of university teachers, and providing consultation services through his company, Code Breaker.

Even with his global reach, Aspinall has kept his home base in the Harrow area. This aligns with one of his core mantras, that no matter what size of town a kid grows up in, coding and computer technology is a field that they can excel in.

“That’s a big message with Code Breaker, is you don’t have to chase the dot com dream so to speak, by heading to Toronto anymore,” said Aspinall. “There’s plenty of opportunity for those young people that live in rural communities to go and change the world.”

At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Code Breaker had already published a handful of educational books and materials. With the uncertainty of in-person learning and travelling up in the air for the time being, Aspinall decided to bring the publishing of educational materials to the forefront to ensure that learning could still continue throughout those times of uncertainty.

“Ultimately, because of a pandemic, we shifted our focus to more publishing full time for the last three years, and now we have over 40 books in our leadership catalogue,” said Aspinall.

Now as one of Canada’s fastest growing independent publishers, Code Breaker Inc has seen one of their latest releases a best-seller in three countries. Last year’s release of “A Mammoth Lesson” by Brett Salakas, a founder of an Australian online teacher’s network, chartered in Canada, the United States, and Australia. 

With technology becoming increasingly integrated into our day to day activities and appliances, Aspinall feels coding and computer sciences will only become more important as an educational component as time goes on.

“What I love the best about coding, is JavaScript here in little Harrow, Ontario is the same in some small town in Japan,” said Aspinall. “We’ve got this sort of universal lens in which our young people can create content and explore their own learning.”

Additional information on Code Breaker Inc.’s consultation services and published works can be found online at codebreakeredu.com.