I just finished teaching the first week of a 9-week, super-intensive, hands-on boot camp that focuses on TypeScript/ASP.NET Web API/AngularJS. I decided to write a series of blog posts that describes each week of the camp. Who makes it. The challenges the students encounter. And, the material that we cover.
The Students
Some of the students are local while other students have travelled from distant corners of the United States to participate in the camp (we provide housing for out-of-town students in the apartment complex across the street).
The goal of the boot camp is to bring students from zero to sixty in six weeks – think Tesla Ludicrous Mode for learning how to code. Students come to the camp with a variety of different backgrounds. Some students have no coding experience: we’ve had a former cook, a best-buy employee, and a professional dancer take the camp (all successfully).
We’ve also had students with a substantial amount of coding experience take the camp including former Microsoft employees and students dropping out of Computer Science programs to get real-world skills. By the second or third week, the differences in the student backgrounds start to fade away (Yes, sometimes but not always, a former cook ends up out-programming a former Microsoft employee).
JavaScript/ECMAScript 2015/TypeScript
The first week of camp is all about teaching students how to program with JavaScript. Not baby JavaScript, professional JavaScript. We focus on ECMAScript 2015 which is the latest release version of JavaScript (this edition was formally named ECMAScript 6). ECMAScript 2015 was officially released in June, 2015.
If you haven’t worked with the latest version of JavaScript then you would be shocked by the number of changes. The latest version of JavaScript is very similar to professional programming languages such as C# and Java. For example, ECMAScript 2015 includes support for classes, inheritance, constructors, lambdas (arrow functions), and for..of loops. It includes new native data structures such as Set and Map collections.
Because ECMAScript 2015 is not supported on all browsers, we use TypeScript as a polyfill so that we can take advantage of the future of JavaScript today.
What Each Day is Like
This is a boot camp. Students strive, struggle, and suffer. They only have 9-weeks to become a programmer and that is not an easy thing to do. After finishing camp, many students have reported that this was the most difficult thing that they have ever accomplished in their life. And, some students do fail.
Most nights, there are students in the Coder Camps offices past 11:00pm. Sometimes, students pull all-nighters.
Here’s what a typical day is like. At 9:00am, we go over the homework from the night before. Each student projects their work onto a big screen and shares their work with the class and we discuss how their code could be improved.
The rest of the day, until 4:00pm, is devoted to lectures and mini-labs. For example, this last week, students learned how to use GitHub, work with ECMAScript for..next, for..in, and for..of loops, and use arrow functions.
At the end of each day, the students complete a brief quiz to check whether they all understand the concepts covered over the course of the day. Finally, students are given a more weighty programming assignment for their night’s homework.
Over the weekend, students are given an even more substantial programming assignment. For example, this weekend, students are building an entire video game using ECMAScript 2015 + Canvas. I’m looking forward to seeing what they built over the weekend on Monday morning.
The Big Goal
The goal of the boot camp is simple: we want to get all of our students hired. I’m proud of the fact that our students have gotten jobs at large companies – such as Microsoft and Boeing – and smaller companies. We’ve had several students hired before the 9 week camp is over.
I don’t want to mislead you – not all students get hired and not all students make it through the camp.
Next Week
This week was all about JavaScript and next week is all about AngularJS. The entire week will be spent on building the client-side portion of Single Page Apps using AngularJS. They’ll learn how to implement client-side routing, perform form validation, use the $http service, and use the $resource factory.
Learn More
If you want to sign up for our next boot camp in Seattle then register here.
So would you like to share the percentage of students that get hired?
@Stilgar – long time! good to hear from you 🙂 I can’t share exact numbers and I certainly cannot guarantee that everyone who graduates will get a job. That said, I am proud of the number of students who we have helped get hired (including at companies such as Microsoft and Boeing) and, as I mentioned above, I am proud of the fact that we’ve had several students hired even before the end of the 9-week bootcamp.
Looking forward to this series of posts. What is the mix of development experience for your students generally.
@Tizzo – The students have a mix of backgrounds. Some of the students have programming and database experience. Most of them are coming from other backgrounds such as journalism and marketing. All of the topics that we cover in the boot camp are so new that differences in background fade away by the second or third week.
I liked your idea of this bootcamp. I want to do something here in Brazil someday, I have a lot of friends, with poor jobs that wanna lean how to code. GOOD JOB !