Founders & Coders

I have been running a series of free, full-time coding courses since January 2014, but this week has been different. On Monday, the latest iteration of Founders & Coders started with 16 new students at our new premises in Globe Town.

Unlike on previous courses, I am now not the only teacher in the room. This time, I am supported by no fewer than 12 graduates of previous courses, who as freelance software developers are sharing the co-working space upstairs.

This is a fundamental shift. We have taken a big step towards a sustainable model of peer-led learning that can be run more-or-less entirely by the students.

Meanwhile, in just a few weeks we have built a small but growing backlog of commercial work. Everyone in the space is working and studying at full tilt.

What started as a six-week programme stitched together from online courses has now become an open-ended software apprenticeship.

All our recent graduates are working at the London Living Wage (about £10/hour) and as their freelance rates begin to edge upwards, we are probably only a couple of months away from being able to pay the rent and cover our overheads.

Let me say a bit about the way the class is organised.

For eight weeks the students work on a series of open-ended projects and they are divided into four teams.

The teams are all supported by a mentor drawn from a previous cohort who, while working on their own project upstairs, will from time-to-time join the team to see how they are doing and offer them support and encouragement.

There is no, or very little, teaching as such—at least not by the mentors—but much discussion of study and research techniques and hints of where to look for answers or whose shoulder to look over. There are also daily presentations by students of their work.

The curriculum (in other words, the content of the weekly projects) is agreed upon by a team made up recent graduates and a couple of more experienced developers.

I am still in the classroom much of the time, but my presence no longer feels strictly necessary. I can see how the next course in May could be delivered almost entirely by the current cohort, who only started their own learning this week.

We are lining up a number of commercial mini-projects for our students (“an MVP for £500”) for the following month, after which—in about 12 weeks time—most of them will be ready to take on more ambitious work at a living wage.

Meanwhile, the confidence, knowledge and skill of those members of the Summer ’14 and Autumn ’14 cohorts who are still with us just continues to grow as they continue to work on an almost constant stream of new projects.

And there are few signs of anyone wanting to leave. Our biggest problem now is working out how we will accommodate a new cohort of 16 students in May in a space that is already bursting at the seams.