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LaunchCode

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BDWbYCSlX8

LaunchCode Recognized by President Obama as National Model for Bridging Tech

“Our solution is to create pathways to upward mobility and economic opportunity through paid

apprenticeships and jobs in technology. We help motivated people find opportunity that they would

never have been exposed to otherwise while helping employers find talented people they would not

consider through their typical hiring channels. ”

Location : St. Louis, currently expanding to Miami, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Denver and having a new

office in San Francisco (they have the objective to extend to all United States)

Founders: Jim McKelvey (founder Square). Brendan Lind

Link: https://www.launchcode.org/

Testimonials: I highly recommend watching the testimonials on their Youtube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWHQMLvwnm_Un83ZKJOk5oQ/videos

LaunchCode Model:

- Apprenticeship system

LaunchCode is on the one hand an apprenticeship system, and on the other a job

placement system. The idea is to convince companies to change their hiring practices to

accept people who have nontraditional credentials.

They started by offering a place for applicants where they can meet and attend together

online courses (the most important course being Harvard CS50 - Introduction to Computer Science -

later detailed).

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“Anyone competing this class has proven something. They demonstrated some character, or

combination of tenacity, intelligence or whatever that magic formula is that gets them through this

preety tough class ”. (Mc Kelvey)

While they started with Harvard and have a great partnership there, they have since

expanded into more than 20 different providers that are teaching coding classes.

LaunchCode also provides tutors that would assist applicants in attending the course.

Although CS 50 course is very well elaborated, it has been observed that only 1% of people who take

the course pass by themselves. This is also a problem known in education as Two Sigma Problem.

They also organize hackatons in places like St. Louis Public Library where people bring their

own laptops. A CS50 Hackathon is an epic late-nighter during which students may dive into a

problem set or final project alongside classmates and staff (and food and photos and fun).For

example more than 1,000 showed up for a presentation at the Peabody Opera House in January.

About 500 later enrolled in the course. And at least 250 are still in it.

They also invited the staff from Harvard responsible for the CS50 course to actually present

live lectures.

- Job placement system

On the other hand, LaunchCode started convincing more than 100 companies in St. Louis

(including big players ex. Mastercard) them to take LaunchCode candidates for a 3 months

internship. During this period they will be involved in pair programming with an experienced coder.

The Pair Programming technique has been described as fundamental by Jim Kelvey.

The instructed coders will work full time with a 15$/hour wage - small comparing with an

average programmer ( low for a reason. they want them to be underpaid so that they don’t stay as

an intern, or in this larvae state, for too long.)

LaunchCode is effective because the nonprofit first works closely with companies to identify

what their specific coding needs are:

“We’re exceptionally good at fitting candidates’ qualities to companies’ needs.” (McKelvey).

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Over 90% of LaunchCode apprentices who prove their skills are hired on as full time

employees. Most apprentices are hired full-time in 3 months, but it mainly depends on them. The

apprenticeship will last as long as it takes for the company to decide whether they want to keep that

candidate, or let him/her go. There were candidates hired after a few weeks, and others take longer

than 3 months

Who can apply to LaunchCode?

students who come from technical backgrounds but who don’t have current

coding experience ;

people previously rejected in interviews;

people who can prove their analytic skills;

people who took more online courses on platforms like EdX and Coursera (They

are currently expanding their model for no programming jobs)

LaunchCode Success:

To date (15 July 2015), LaunchCode has placed more than 140 people in full-time

computer programming jobs with an average salary of $50,000 per year in St. Louis alone. By its

estimation, LaunchCode has put $28 million back into the local economy. They are projected to have

nearly $3 million in revenue in 2015.

As LaunchCode is growing, is getting easier for them to approach big companies.

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LaunchCode model solves two of the biggest problems of the online education:

Recognition of the degrees by employers

High drop-out rates - allowing face to face collaboration in attending online courses

increases the engagement of participants

“Other similar tentatives failed because employers do not pay attention to online degrees.”

“One of the issues we have is how do we get employers to recognize our certificates

as valid credentials.” (Anant Agarwal, CEO EdX)

LaunchCode was also touted as a national model for President Obama's new $100 million

TechHire program, which is looking to boost hiring in the tech sector across the nation. That money

has yet to be distributed and LaunchCode will have to apply for those funds when the application

period opens.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BDWbYCSlX8

CodeGirls

- https://www.launchcode.org/coder_girl

CoderGirl is building a network of support for aspiring female coders. Participants, ranging

from beginners to long-time programmers, hone their skills alongside fellow aspiring developers and

female mentors from companies like Boeing, MasterCard, and Enterprise.

In the inaugural CoderGirl session, over 100 women from all walks of life turned out to begin

edX's CS50 course as a pathway into professional programming. We meet on Wednesdays at the CIC

(4240 Duncan Ave) 6-8pm in St. Louis.

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A lot of the best programmers are self instructed – the survey done by StackOverflow

done this year found that 41.8% are self-taught.

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Harvard CS50: Introduction to Computer Science

"CS50 changed my life. I continue to learn and build, it gave me a great foundation ... I think it's so wonderful that you all are taking it, because that's how the world is going to change."

YouTube CEO, Susan Wojcicki

Platform: EdX (MOOC platform by Harvard and MIT)

Price: free (edX Verified Certificate available – 90$ )

Link: https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-computer-science-harvardx-cs50x

Session: students can attend the course at their own pace the entire year

Workload: 10-20hr/week for 10 weeks

- Course Syllabus – attached

- Students are highly encouraged to participate into groups and forums:

If you're the Facebook type,

join CS50's Facebook Group at facebook.com/groups/cs50,

follow CS50's Facebook Page at facebook.com/cs50, and/or

follow (and say hello to!) David at facebook.com/dmalan.

If you're the Twitter type,

1. follow @cs50,

2. say hello to classmates with hashtag #cs50, and/or

3. follow (and say hello!) to @davidjmalan.

Start a discussion with classmates on CS50's "subreddit" or chat in real-time

with classmates via CS50's Slack.

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CS50 Hackathons (an epic late-nighter are organized in these cities:

Cambridge

Chennai

Houston

Masterton

Rome

Seattle

St. Louis

Visit cs50.harvard.edu/propose to propose other cities.

Even though CS50 "is not an easy course" and has "a correct reputation as being a lot of work," there have been signs for a few years that it would soon become Harvard's most popular class.

It is the course with the highest attendance at Harvard : 800 students last Fall.

"CS50 is an unusual course in that it serves multiple audiences — it's the introductory course for computer science concentrations and it's also a course for students who want a serious introduction but are not planning to be majors."

(Harry Lewis, the director of undergraduate studies for the computer science department, Harvard).

The instructor of the course in David Malan, who is described as "a fabulous teacher and is very, very innovative in how he's rethinking the traditional parts of the course."

Malan goes quickly through his lectures. You have to stop and rewind them frequently to catch what he is doing.

For those who need additional help, Malan hosts office hours in an undergraduate house dining hall every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday from 9 p.m. until midnight. He says anywhere from 50 to 150 students attend those office hours, and he admits just standing in the room is a much more valuable experience, because he can work one-on-one with students and cater to each one’s individual needs.

CS50 has staff of more than 100 TAs and TFs. Logistics is great! More than 73% of the people have no prior CS background but less continue into being a Computer Science major, unlike at MIT.

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The CS50.tv collection online is pretty amazingly complete: there are scans of the handouts, quizzes, problem tests, additional readings, supplemental lectures and so forth. The courseware is very solidly organized and designed and very impressive.

- What are the top 10 big ideas in Harvard's CS50? (excerpts from Quora)

1. Divide and Conquer

From day one, I think Professor Malan does the Phonebook lookup and lecture hall count example. They were fun, simple and intuitive demos that showed how easily "divide-and-conquer" paradigms could be applied to solve problems that are rather nasty to attempt by brute force.

2. Encapsulating work.

We don't actually talk about object oriented programming in Cs50, although I'm sure you can pick it up on your own as well as in follow up courses like CS51, CS50 does emphasize other things, like functions and structs. It seems odd if the point of coding is in part to accomplish things more efficiently if your own code is very inefficiently written.

3. The inequality of code.

You'll learn about a few different bread-and-butter algorithms like Merge Sort, Insertion Sort, Selection Sort, etc, and you'll appreciate that there is always more than a single approach to solving a problem, but that not all approaches are equal. For a fun video, see:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4RRi_ntQc8

4. Memory and pointers.

Memory management won't of course be an issue if you're working in languages like Python and OCaml (although pointers do exist), but understanding the mechanics of how code "works" involves understanding at least a rudimentary level how your computer "works", including how memory and space move around during a program's execution.

4 Syntax as secondary.

Obviously, syntax is important if you want your code to run, but the fact that CS50 races through a quarter dozen languages in the course of a semester highlights that learning syntax is only a small part of the process of learning how to code.

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5. Getting into the mind of the program.

Print statements and GDB are debugging essentials. Actually, the first way you know if something is wrong right off the bat is if the compiler tells you something is wrong, and if you're lucky, the compiler pretty much guides you through it all. But often times, it's logical errors that are easy to miss. For a beginning programer, you've probably use print statements to see the code's "thought process" and more later into the course, you'll probably have touched GDB at some point to also walk through your code's "thought process" and see what's actually going under the details.

6. Programming as systems development.

Of course, code has to start somewhere and in early p-sets you definitely do write small programs from the bottom up, but in later and more difficult p-sets, you're adding code to pre-exisiting distribution code, and this is more realistic of the sort of work you'll be doing in "real life" coding, whether as part of a research group or as part of your software engineering internship/job.

7. Documentation and "story-telling".

Writing good code is like writing a good story, and working code is just a part of the product. If you have hopeless variable and function names, and you haven't bother to comment in your thinking, you make it extremely difficult, if not altogether impossible, for others to build upon what you've done (see 6). This will make final projects frustrating. That said, after CS50, when you go off to work on your own projects, you'll have to learn how to read the documentation others have before you, to avoid reinventing the wheel and thus minimizing errors on your end, and making your code a lot more usable.

8. Web development.

CS50 is a little atypical in the sense that most introductory computer science courses at other schools don't integrate any sort of web development discussion as part of their curriculum, and I think what CS50 does is cool because it speaks to the reality that web development is a huge industry in its own right especially with everything going to the cloud. In fact, I most non-STEM kids enroll in CS50 just to be able to make a cool website of their own at the end. Going back to point 4, I think being able to jump into something drastically within a few short weeks kind of lets kids be more gutsy with their final projects (you'll see quite a few with steep learning curves that implement Android or iOS apps).

9. Programming and coding as non-synonyms.

Yes, programming and coding are not the same thing. You can code up a static site in HTML, but this is almost completely different from programming an interactive app. Programming involves certain logic, but coding does not always.

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10. Anyone can program.

This is, after all, CS50. If it's one thing Professor Malan can leave you with, it's this key lesson: that anyone (and I mean anyone) can program. I came into the class as a sophomore who had sometimes been even afraid of Mathematica before CS50 (yes, ridiculously lame, but please don't laugh!). Now, I feel pretty comfortable picking up a bunch of languages on my own, and actually coding just for fun. While Cs50 is by no means perfect, it's certainly laudable for a being a serious class without being a "weeding-out" class. I don't know if Nobel prizes are given out for educational initiatives, but after Khan Academy and EdX/OCW, CS50 would be it (in fact, even Yale has adopted the course for its own campus, even though I'm sure it must have pretty solid intro CS classes too).

LaunchCode Resources:

http://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/blog/biznext/2014/04/launchcode-ready-for-national- expansion.html?page=all

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http://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/print-edition/2015/07/10/brendan-lind-27-co-founder- and-executive-director.html

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/hello-professor-launchcode-brings-harvard-to- st-louis/article_be7bcc1f-6899-5ca5-8c0c-125aa06c9bdb.html

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-way-get-coding-job-david-strom?

trkInfo=VSRPsearchId%3A1311531441438722655397%2CVSRPtargetId

%3A5990844919445475328%2CVSRPcmpt

%3Aprimary&trk=vsrp_influencer_content_res_name

http://blog.strom.com/wp/?p=4059

http://miamiherald.typepad.com/the-starting-gate/2015/03/launchcode-signs-up-102-

companies-now-accepting-apprenticeship-applicants--1.html

https://www.launchcode.org/faq

https://www.pehub.com/2013/01/a-new-incubator-launchcode-courts-customers- employees/

http://techli.com/2015/03/launchcode-recognized-by-president-obama-as-national-model- for-bridging-tech/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BDWbYCSlX8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL9WHMTvl9A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60X5NaUIPyo

LaunchCode Testimonials:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWHQMLvwnm_Un83ZKJOk5oQ/videos

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Harvard CS50 Resources:

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-so-many-harvard-students-take-computer-science- 2014-9

http://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-ceo-susan-wojcicki-on-harvard-cs50-2014-9

http://bostinno.streetwise.co/all-series/all-students-can-succeed-the-man-behind-harvards- cs50-course-on-teaching-open-education/

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