The App Academy Experience and Related Thoughts
As some of you may know, my programming skills were forged at App Academy (a/A), a web development bootcamp. I found the process incredibly interesting for a lot of reasons:
You pay a percentage (18%) of your first year’s gross instead of a fixed full amount up front
I LIKE THIS. Instead of being run through a mill and set out in the wild to fend for yourself, a/A really takes a serious interest in finding you a job. Hence their incredible job placement numbers, percentage-wise in the high nineties. I have considered whether all forms of post-secondary education should subscribe to this system. Within a capitalist framework: Yes. It is reprehensible that that institutions like Phoenix University sap away GI bill and citizen money churning out lousy degrees and unemployable graduates. But there are two major factors that allow this system to be financially sustainable. First, graduates in this field find jobs that command salaries around 100k (in the Bay Area). Second, the decease financial barrier of entry to a/A increases their pool of applicants and their acceptance parameters are more stringent (learn Ruby, pass like coding tests). Would this system fly for liberal arts degrees? I am not sure, which is why I framed my answer in a capitalist form. This system would only favor departments that turned out lucrative students.
The TAs and Director at a/A had little formal experience, both in being educators and being web developers.
WAT? Ned, our fearless director who’s infinite wisdom and sage advice wells up during Dayquil binges (ok, not really), is a fantastic chap and gifted programmer. The TAs are all great people, very knowledgeable but many of whom were a/A grads themselves. But to my understanding, none of them had any significant time employed as Rails developers (the framework taught at a/A). The hypocrisy of this concern is that I was later hired for a job that ‘required’ 3-5 years of experience. So perhaps experience isn’t all its chocked up to be.
Regarding the staff’s ability to teach: my own formal training deals with larger student-to-teacher ratios, classroom management and diversity training. But all I could think of is how amazing this would be as the next wave of vocational training. But adapting it to an actual classroom would be quite challenging. As a future endeavor I would like to see Rails adapted into a high school ready course. This also leads into my next topic.
Assessment at a/A
Educators are taught that fairness in assessment can be achieved through a good rubric, and to some extent a/A does exactly that. Their weekly tests have practice exams for which the rubric are the specs (almost as if there were a scantron machine for your program, but with better feedback) said practice exam needs to pass. By TA recommendation and since the limiting resource during the test seems to be time, I took the practice exam over and over until I could fly through it under the allotted time. But their actual tests are quite similar to the practice exams resulting in an incredibly grading curve. Generally more than half the class would get perfect grades and the averages were a few percentage points shy of 100%. If you were invited to retake a test because you fell bellow the curved cutoff and failing 2 exams often meant disciplinary action (you might be asked to leave). Yours truly didn’t have to retake any tests, though definitely fell within a fraction of a point of needing to do so a few times. It is my assessment that this grading pattern is the result of a/A having strict acceptance standards (most people had college degrees) and hence well-formed study habits.
A Vocational Approach?
Though we did touch on some of the more theoretical aspects of programming and computer science, by and large we studied how to create and maintain Ruby on Rails web applications with a client-side MVC (for a snappier user experience). If you go on Craigslist and search “Ruby on Rails” in the Bay Area you find hundreds of job offerings for something that was taught to us in 9 weeks. With the current education climate leaning toward ever more digitization, a Web Developer track education could be part of the last two years of high school for any student with a solid grasp of algebra.
But there’s something else. Another selling point of an a/A grad IS that we picked up languages and frameworks in a short span. Did a/A teach us how to be versatile programmers or merely have a tuned selection process that selected for that trait? Since graduating I’ve picked up a bit of C (for Arduino projects), Python and Swift. Can that sort of adaptability be taught in that short of time? Jury is still out on that one.