Firefly Coders' Policy
Terms and Conditions
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This document is a legal contract between Firefly Coders (“Firefly Coders”, “fireflycoders.com”, or “the company”) and users (“you”, “the user”, or “the Participant”). Firefly Coders is a wholly owned subsidiary of Sampath Investment Holdings LLC.
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What does Firefly Coders do?
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We provide an online interactive platform through which we can teach coding to children.
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Terms of our service
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By signing up for either a live online interactive class, or platform access, or any other service or product offered by Firefly Coders, you agree to these terms of service. Note that you MUST be over 18 years old to access the company’s platform, its services, and products. If you are under this age, your parent or legal guardian must review and agree to these terms and conditions and complete registration before you may use this site. If you do not agree with these terms and conditions of service, you may not use this platform or any services/products offered by Firefly Coders.
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Parents and Legal Guardians: What are you consenting to in relation to your child?
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By signing up on fireflycoders.com as a parent or legal guardian, you understand that you, and not your child, are signing up to create an account. Therefore, you are consenting to your child’s use of our platform under your account, and that during your child’s interaction and use of our platform, we can collect personal information from your child and use your child’s user-generated content and make it accessible and usable on our platform(s). If our approach to collecting your consent leaves you with a concern or question, please review the COPPA section in this document, or contact us through support@fireflycoders.com – we will be happy to explain.
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Arbitration
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All claims and disputes arising under or relating to this Agreement are to be settled by binding arbitration in the state of Massachusetts or another location mutually agreeable to the parties. The arbitration shall be conducted on a strictly confidential basis pursuant to the Commercial Arbitration Rules of the American Arbitration Association. Any decision or award as a result of any such arbitration proceeding shall be in writing and shall provide an explanation for all conclusions of law and fact and shall include the assessment of costs, expenses, and reasonable attorneys' fees. Any such arbitration shall be conducted by an arbitrator (“Arbitrator”) experienced in technology litigation and shall include a written record of the arbitration hearing. The parties reserve the right to object to any individual who shall be employed by or affiliated with a competing organization or entity. An award of arbitration may be confirmed in a court of competent jurisdiction.
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Both the company and you shall equally share the fees and costs of the Arbitrator. Each party will deposit funds or post other appropriate security for its share of the Arbitrator's fee, in an amount and manner determined by the Arbitrator, 10 days before the first day of hearing. Each party shall pay for its own costs and attorneys' fees, if any, provided that the Arbitrator, in its sole discretion, may award reasonable fees to the prevailing party in a proceeding.
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Furthermore, you agree that all claims pursued against the company will be on an individual basis. To that end, you hereby waive their right to commence, to become a party to, or to remain a participant in, any group, representative, class, collective, or hybrid class/collective action in any court, arbitration proceeding, or any other forum, against the other. The parties agree that any claim by or against the Company or the Participant shall be heard in arbitration without joinder of parties or consolidation of such claim with any other person or entity’s claim, except as otherwise agreed to in writing by the Company and the Participant.
User Generated Content
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You hereby agree and represent and warrant that (i) you are solely responsible for your User Content, (ii) you own all rights in and to your User Content and/or have obtained appropriate rights and permissions from any and all other persons and/or entities who own, manage or otherwise claim any rights with respect to such User Content, (iii) the Licensed Parties’ use of your User Content as described herein will not violate the rights, including but not limited to copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret, privacy, publicity, moral, proprietary or other rights, of any third party, or any law, rule or regulation, and (iv) the User Content is not libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, abusive, indecent, threatening, harassing, hateful, or offensive or otherwise unlawful.
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Compliance with Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act (COPPA)
To teach online, we use tools including (but not limited to) Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu), Google Classroom (https:// https://classroom.google.com) and Zoom (https://www.zoom.us/). To use these tools, we may need your child to register at these sites. During class, we may ask the child to provide their username (that does not include the child’s name) and password. We may also request information for notification purposes, such as a parent or guardian’s email address, the child’s first name and gender, and birth date. In such cases, unless we otherwise obtain consent or notify the parent of ongoing communications (as discussed below), we will hash such email address such that it can only be used as a password reminder and cannot be used to contact the child.
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At any point in time, we will delete this information if requested by you (the parent or legal guardian).
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Content: We may allow children to submit content to us, for example the location of a Scratch project they’ve completed. This information will typically never contain personal information about the child. However, if a child includes personal information in such content, we will take reasonable measures to delete the personal information or first seek parental consent. As mentioned in “Technology Use Authorization” in our “Waiver” document, we will make every effort to safeguard your child from inappropriate content during their use of Firefly Coders’ platform, but we are not responsible for incidents that occur outside our control.
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Information to Obtain Parental Consent: We may ask a child for a parent’s or guardian’s email address or other permissible contact information in order to request consent. If we do not receive parental consent within a reasonable time, we will delete the contact information and any other related information collected from the child. We may conduct other methods of parental consent permitted by COPPA, including obtaining a credit card number and charging a fee (which may be nominal), asking a parent to speak to a customer service representative by phone or video, or requiring submission of a signed consent form.
Persistent Identifiers: Our online services may automatically collect persistent identifiers for internal operations, including to provide and improve our online services, conduct analytics, authenticate users, personalize content, maintain the security and integrity of the service, and to ensure legal or regulatory compliance. Specifically, we may collect Internet protocol or IP address, pages and content visited, the type and version of operating system or web browser, device ID. We, or our third party service providers, may collect this information using HTTP cookies, flash cookies, HTML5 and Flash local storage, web beacons/GIFs, embedded scripts, and ETags/cache browsers (“Cookies”).
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Disclosure of Personal Information from Children
We may share or disclose personal information collected from children in the following circumstances:
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As permitted or required by law, including in response to a court order or a subpoena.
- To protect the safety of a child, to prevent a crime, or to facilitate a public safety investigation;
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To take precautions against liability; or
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To protect the security or integrity of our online services.
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In addition, personal information collected from a child may be shared or publicly posted if we first obtain parental consent.
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If you have any questions and/or requests regarding your child’s privacy and our approach to this, please contact us at support@fireflycoders.com. We would be delighted to assist you.
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Cancelation and Refund Policy
Please not that Firefly Coders is referred to in this document as “Firefly Coders” or “fireflycoders.com” or “the company”. We use class registrations to predict whether a class will happen, so last-minute student cancellations do impact other students enrolled in class as well as our instructors who are planning to teach.
We've created the policies below to be fair to our parents and students, our instructors, and to Firefly Coders.
Please note, we offer a full refund if we have to cancel a class due to low enrollment. This policy supersedes any policies below.
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Behavior Policy
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Coding is an academic topic which may not be the best fit for all kids. If your child has behavioral issues in a regular classroom, they will probably struggle in Firefly Coders.
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Class Disruption
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Examples of class disruption are students who are severely off task, bothering other students, being too noisy, running on and off screen constantly, etc. We will contact you regarding the situation so you can address the issue with your child. After that, if a behavior issue continues, we will contact you regarding withdrawal from the class and give you a partial refund for the remaining classes (75% x pro-rated cost of remaining classes; for example, if 3 sessions remain of a 5 session course, we will refund 75% of 3/5th of the course fee).
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Extreme Behavior
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In the case of bullying and/or verbal abuse toward another class member or teacher, or extreme behavior such as fighting, screaming, etc., your child will be removed from class with no refund.
In the case of behavior such as posting or display of inappropriate images, videos, messages, etc. in group forums, profile pictures, during online sessions, or through other class media/portals, your child will be removed from any registered class with no refund and membership to Firefly Coders will be revoked.
Indemnification
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You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless Firefly Coders from and against any loss, cost, or damage of any kind (including reasonable outside attorneys’ fees) to the extent arising out of its breach of this Agreement, and/or its negligence or willful misconduct, and/or from actions of other parties utilizing its platform (including but not limited to posts and/or comments on any of its pages by other parties, and during online classes, etc.).
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Refund Policy for Regular Classes
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Cancel 7 days before class starts, we offer a full refund.
Cancel within 7 days of class, we can give you a 75% refund.
If you withdraw your child after the first class, we can give you a 10% refund.
No refunds are allowed after the second class.
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Summer Camp Refund Policy
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We offer a full refund 14 days before the start of camp.
(We also offer a full refund anytime if you can replace your enrollment with another student.)
We offer a 50% refund within 8-14 days of camp.
No refunds are allowed within 7 days of camp.
Consenting as a parent or legal guardian
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What are you consenting to in relation to your child?
By signing up on fireflycoders.com as a parent or legal guardian, you understand that you, and not your child, are signing up to create an account. Therefore, you are consenting to your child’s use of our platform under your account, and that during your child’s interaction and use of our platform, we can collect personal information from your child and use your child’s user-generated content and make it accessible and usable on our platform(s). If our approach to collecting your consent leaves you with a concern or question, please just contact us using the Contact Us form at fireflycoders.com – we will be happy to explain.
Indemnification
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You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless Firefly Coders from and against any loss, cost, or damage of any kind (including reasonable outside attorneys’ fees) to the extent arising out of its breach of this Agreement, and/or its negligence or willful misconduct, and/or from actions of other parties utilizing its platform (including but not limited to posts and/or comments on any of its pages by other parties, and during online classes, etc.).
Waiver & Release
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Photo Waiver
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You allow Firefly Coders to take and use pictures of our classes, post pictures on social media or our website, and share pictures with parents. We take pictures and share them so that you can receive updates about your child’s progress and also to inform other parents about our activities. We NEVER share the child’s name, photo, and/or identity without your express permission.
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I do hereby consent and agree that Firefly Coders has the right to take photographs and video of my child during Firefly Coders sessions. These photos and video may be used on the company website (www.FireflyCoders.com), company social media pages, and promotional material without compensation.
I understand that my child's name and identity will not be revealed without my consent. If you'd rather we not take photographs or videos of your child, please email us at support@FireflyCoders.com and we will indicate as such on our roster.
Communication
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Firefly Coders communicates via email for transaction emails and marketing. By registering for our class and agreeing to these terms, you are opting in to receive our emails. We do not send frequent marketing emails (because we don’t love them ourselves), but if you wish to unsubscribe at any time, please click the unsubscribe button at the bottom of the email. Instructors may text or call you in the case of emergency or if they need to communicate with you. Phone numbers are not used for any marketing and your personal information is kept completely private.
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I agree to receive email and other communications from Firefly Coders as indicated above.
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Technology Use Authorization
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Every attempt will be made by Firefly Coders staff to protect your child from risks involving the Internet, such as (but not limited to) viewing inappropriate material and cyber-bullying. Historically we have had few issues with inappropriate Internet use, but the risk still exists and we are not responsible for incidents which occur outside of our control. Additionally, during a class, children are sometimes unable to identify code/code blocks the instructor is calling attention to. In this case, the instructor might request permission to control the child's computer to assist with the coding activity.
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I agree to release Firefly Coders from responsibility for any issues resulting from technology use.
Release / Indemnification: I hereby release absolutely, hold harmless and covenant not to sue Firefly Coders, LLC, and my child’s camp/class facility, its directors, employees, agents, volunteers, and affiliates from any and all present or future liability, claims, demands, actions or rights of action, including in the case of ordinary negligence on the part of Firefly Coders or its staff. I agree to indemnify and hold harmless Firefly Coders for any such Claims brought by me or a third party from any costs associated with defending or litigating such claims, including but not limited to attorney fees, costs and legal expenses.