Code Academy Instructor Raghu Betina was a featured speaker on the New Empire Builders. Raghu discusses the transformational effects of widespread coding knowledge and literacy on solving real problems.
Listen to the interview here.
Jason Becker is the co-founder of two start-ups: Remember.com and Dreamt.it. He is a graduate of DePauw University (B.A., Economics), Northwestern University (M.A., Learning and Organizational Change) and Code Academy. Follow him and his projects through @jedwardbecker, @remember and @dreamt_it.
I’m Jason Becker, a member of the inaugural Code Academy class from 2011 and start-up entrepreneur. I came to Code Academy after having started Remember.com in order to learn the basics of programming, how to work better with development teams and meet interesting people.
For me, Code Academy was extremely challenging. Consuming that much new information while forging new relationships and using foreign tools is stressful. I had to find ways to manage the stress of the new information productively.
My best advice is to rethink how you learn before attending Code Academy. Adhering to these simple principles helped me immensely with my Code Academy journey. Spoiler: I was finishing my Master’s in Learning and Organizational Change while attending Code Academy, so I’m a learning fiend.
Rethink how you learn
True learning, not mere retention, is a contact sport. It’s hard, uncomfortable and extremely stressful. However, you can persevere and become an expert learner by learning and practicing how to learn. Sounds ridiculous, right? But, your brain is like any other muscle: the more you use it and harder you work it, the better your brain becomes. Code Academy and 1871 are gymnasiums for you to expand your learning abilities beyond imagination.
Set specific learning goals
Code Academy provides a phenomenally well-guided learning experience. Instruction, in-class exercises and projects get progressively more challenging as you navigate the 12-week experience. Setting specific, measurable and actionable learning goals will help you sustain effort and focus through periods of frustration or setback (they’ll happen if you actually learning!). You need a deep understanding of your goals and purpose in order to get the most out of your Code Academy experience.
Seek mastery over performance goals
Most educational systems are designed to compare your performance with your peers’, but what matters in true learning is striving to improve and develop your own skills to become a master. Let’s face it, the whiz kid’s performance across the room is irrelevant to your personal learning journey. Pursuing mastery isn’t for the faint of heart, you’ll make mistakes and face tremendous difficulties. However, those apparent setbacks are strong indications that you’re on the right path.
Be meta
Thinking about and being aware that you’re learning increases your ability to encode new information, relate it to something you already understand and recall it later on. This process is called metacognition. It’s a fancy way of saying: “pay attention to your learning and focus on it.” Remember, learning is a contact sport where you cannot passively consume the experience and knowledge of Code Academy instructors and mentors. You have to seek out new information, discover it and play with it through experimentation and discussions.
Code Academy's first Builder's Weekend took place this past weekend at 1871. Unlike traditional Startup Weekends and Hakathons, students were given 24 hours to push through as much code and design as they could. The goal coming in wasn't to create a feasible business or business plan, but instead to focus on a core feature, problem, or solution that seemed feasible to solve in just one day as a team.
Teams split off into groups, found silos and meeting rooms across 1871 to work and play all evening. Red Bull, candy and beer was the meal of choice. 24 hours later by mid afternoon it was clear progress had been made. Exhausted, Code Academy students made their final pushes, their final commits, tied in front-end design with backend, some even pushed to Heroku. An entire night spent pounding through Gems, mashups, stylesheets, iteration and implementation proved hugely challenging, but completely rewarding.
Together over 40 Summer 2012 students formed over 10 teams. Here's a quick breakdown of what was built and presented just 24 hours in the making:
Work & Burp
Going from API to API, team Work & Burp finally settled on one that would provide them just what they needed, restaurants filterable by BYOB and WIFI. Using their application you set your geolocation and within a radius find out which restaurants nearest you have both WIFI and BYOB.
Nearby Crime
After a troubling time getting home, Code Academy student Omar decided he needed a transit application that would re-route him around some of Chicago's trouble spots. Pulling in the Google Maps API and mashing up Chicago Public Crime data they were able to overlay a heat map showing Chicago's roughest patches. Set your destination and your route, be sure to avoid the 'red'!
What Would You Do If You Were 5?
Sharing in the virability of Facebook app What Would You Do If You Weren't Scared, Team What Would You Do If, created an application where users could share exactly what they would do if they were 5 again.
Win 2 beers & chips
Team Belgians created a game with a live leader board. Students ran through a series of 6 questions as we watched in real-time who finished first, second and third. The winners of course received beer and chips.
CA SOS
To better facilitate Code Academy students when they hit errors or get stuck, team CA SOS created an application to notify alumni and the class where you're stuck and what you need help with.
Watado
Pulling in local event APIs, Watado displays what's happening in your area now.
HappyHealth.me
Part of LeanStartup, HappyHealth.me is setting out to create a single point of entry for patients visiting new physicians. Instead of having to continually fill out patient history, new forms, their goal is to show up and have your information ready to go.
Instalymplics
Add in a location and time for an event, concert or venue and see all the crowdsourced photos from Instagram for it. See what people are posting from the Olympics, your favorite lounge in Vegas, or recent concert.
From My Farmer
From My Farm is an online platform for farmers to sell direct to customers. Their goal ultimately is to remove the middle man and build out a solution as an open platform for equal access to locally grown food.
Kill Small Talk
Bars aren't great date spots. Small Talk kills. How can we get around this? With a web app! Team Kill Small Talk pulls in local Twitter feeds, culls for the most frequented language and helps you avoid small talk by raising bigger topics of conversation. Ultimately Team Small Talk will create social awareness and connectedness in the real world.
Just think, 5 weeks ago most of you knew nothing about software development or web applications. And now look! We're extremely impressed and proud to see what was accomplished. Not to mention the number of you pulling an all-nighter to get this done. True dedication.
There were a clear number of #ah-ha's this weekend, and we can't wait to see more as each of you continue to learn, grow and build.
Think about one of your favorite teachers. Why was he or she your favorite? Did you learn a lot? Were the lectures inspiring and entertaining? This is what I’ve learned through my process of becoming a life-long student and researcher of how we learn...
Read the rest on Technori.
Today we're excited to introduce you to our monthly newsletter geared for the entire community!
Our first issue for July 2012 just hit inboxes a few minutes ago. View it online: http://mad.ly/d215f2
We look forward to sharing news from our current class, alumni and events month-to-month. There's a ton of exciting things happening with Code Academy, our community, Chicago and we're here to deliver them to you!
Sign up for our newsletter here on the blog. You'll see the signup in the sidebar. If you have any tips, or items you're interested in sharing, email the staff.
Just over two weeks ago, Code Academy was extremely fortunate to come away with three of the inaugural Moxie Awards: Best Education Startup, Best Bootstrapped Startup, and Best Startup Co-Founders. It was an amazing night and we are so grateful for the people who voted for us and came out to support us during the event. However, what these awards demonstrate more than anything is the unbelievable support we have received during our first year.
While our full list of thanking people would be a mile long, I wanted to dedicate this post to some of the amazing people that helped Code Academy become what it is today.
Our main man. The guy who found us on Twitter thanks to some timely (and at the time a tad premature) tweets by Corey Haines, Sarah Gray, Ray Hightower and others. Whatever our thought was at the time, it worked out perfectly because Jeff followed up with Neal and the rest was history. He is the most awesome Ruby on Rails instructor in the world, and he is one of the most important reasons why Code Academy is what it is today.
Troy has been with us way before the start of Code Academy. Dating back to Neal’s early Northwestern days, Troy has been a close mentor as Neal gained valuable experience founding companies and working in the venture capital world. When we first came up with the idea of a “coding school” we created a presentation deck and went to Troy’s house to give him the pitch. Since then we have turned to Troy numerous times for advice on how to make Code Academy successful.
Harper plays a very interesting role in our Code Academy story. Actually, he played a role even before Code Academy was an idea. Nudging Neal into programming back when he was just a “business guy”; seeding the idea for Code Academy and for Code Mountain; and then almost derailing both of those projects by trying to get us to work for the Obama campaign. Suffice to say that whenever Harper interacts with us, epic things happen. We are very grateful to have him as a close friend and advisor.
Getting Dave Hoover to help build Code Academy was one of our most important events of Spring 2011. Dave has been an advocate for beginner-focused learning, especially since he didn’t start learning programming until he was 25! Dave was instrumental in rallying the Chicago software development community around our idea. We also have to thank Dave for single-handedly increasing our mentor community size from 6 to 41 in a single week during our first Code Academy class! We have been so grateful to have Dave in our corner and are excited to continue working with him in the future.
Corey and Sarah spent a lot of time with us early on to help us set the right expectations with our vision for Code Academy. They also introduced us to some key people and organizations in Chicago that ultimately led to us working with Dave Hoover/Obtiva, 8thlight, and more closely with Elliott Garms.
Steve Collens and JB Pritzker
The team behind the scenes of 1871. Back in April 2011 when Code Academy was starting to get off the ground, Troy introduced Neal to Steve Collens, who was at that time the newly-minted SVP of the Pritzker Group and tasked with leading one of the largest entrepreneurial endeavors in the history of Chicago (nbd). Neal met with him to talk about what Code Academy was and what it could do for the city of Chicago. After that meeting, Steve and JB have been some of the biggest supporters of Code Academy in Chicago, providing the perfect and thankfully permanent home for Code Academy to live and thrive.
Our #1 Code Academy advocate. I have had numerous friends who work at different places in Chicago that, “I just was in a company-wide meeting with Kevin Willer and kept talking about Code Academy!” Also, a big thanks to Kevin for the epic call to action by telling us that doing Code Academy would be “bigger than Obama.”
Matt McCall
Without Matt’s help we wouldn’t be doing Code Academy right now! He was a spark for us to ultimately choose to start Code Academy over pursuing the OFA opportunity with Harper. Similar to Kevin, he conveyed to us that the impact we could have on Chicago and the Software Development community would be meteoric.
SPARK Chicago was an amazing event and turned out to be an unexpected catalyst for Code Academy in the month leading up to our official launch. Thanks to Maliha, Seth and Val for encouraging us to apply for SPARK, for building SPARK and continuing to help us as Code Academy advisors and supporters!
Bernhard Kappe, Todd Wyder and the Pathfinder team
A big thank you to Pathfinder Software for incubating us in your beautiful offices, helping us win SPARK and start Code Academy! From August to October, your help was extremely critical in our success. Also I want to thank Jennifer Fournier and Brian Chamberlain for their tireless design and development during the SPARK finals. The Code Mountain app would have never looked/worked as well as it did without your help! And a big thanks for Mario Montgomery for helping us with our initial Code Academy marketing and planning our inaugural Code Academy party at Pathfinder!
When we launched our first ever push for applications in August 2011, Built in Chicago was our first voice. Since then, Built in Chicago has continued to support and promote our efforts to help make CA a household name in Chicago. Thank you to Matt, Maria, and Adam for the great community they have created in such a short time. We look forward to continuing our partnership together to make Chicago the best city in the world to start a digital company!
The Inaugural Class of Code Academy
These 35 students were the first ones willing to fully invest into Code Academy. Before we had a classroom, computers, and a track record of success, your passion and persistence was evident from day one. Without your commitment, Code Academy would not have been able to continue.
An amazing Ruby on Rails instructor (it’s a horse race between Jeff Cohen and Jeff Casimir for best instructor in the world) and is a great advisor to Code Academy. Very influential in the early days of Code Academy by helping our shape our teaching methodology/curriculum.
The man. The myth. The legend. Jim Dugan has been extremely helpful to Neal as a boss, a mentor, and great friend. Jim’s entrepreneurship session at Code Academy is one of the most valuable events we have each quarter.
Eddie Lou at Shiftgig
Former OCA Ventures boss of Neal’s who was a great advisor during the formation of Code Academy. Eddie has been hugely supportive while growing his own startup (ShiftGig).
Thank you for your support in helping us get space for Fall Quarter. Thanks for your initial support of Code Academy, and thanks for speaking at our entrepreneurship sessions!
Thank you for coming quarter after quarter to talk to our students and being an overall advocate to Code Academy, for attending our Spring Quarter Demo Day, arriving early, and staying late!
Elliott helped seed the Code Academy idea and helped us with an initial group of influential developers to spread our idea to. He's one of the best tech-connectors Chicago has!
We have Abi to thank for planting the idea for a coding school in Neal's brain (inception). Without his prodding, CA would not have been started!
Thank you for giving us our first home. The first three months of Code Academy would not have been the same without you all enabling us to call 600 West Chicago home.
Thank you to the SMS Assist team for allowing us to work out of your space for our Winter Quarter program. Your staff was incredibly gracious to us as we expanded our program and the view from the John Hancock Center was incredible.
1871 team: Una, Caity, Kim
Thanks for supporting through the CEC while 1871 was being built and thank you for letting us host the first public event ever at 1871! The opportunity to be at 1871 was one that we had been waiting for during the past year, and we couldn’t be more excited to be one of the anchor tenants there.
There’s so many people we need to thank! The 100+ Designers and Developers who volunteer their time to mentor our students every quarter. The 170 alumni we have today that continue to support us and each other. To our current Summer 2012 class for retaining the quality of ‘awesome’ set by the previous classes. And a big thank you to the people who make Code Academy run – our staff, Kelsey, Vince, Raghu, Dave, Jessica, Carolyn, Shay, and Jeff.
While we are a bootstrapped company, we feel that the city has invested in us with all your support. We look forward to continuing our growth and making Chicago the best city in the world to solve meaningful problems.
Applications are open for Fall 2012, so if you are interested in being a part of the next quarter of Code Academy go to http://codeacademy.org/apply to apply now. Applications close Sunday, August 12th at 11:59pm.