🗒️ Minutes of the Global Syllabus Team

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{DATE_HERE}

Attendees:

❗Actions from last time

📝 Agenda points

❗Actions

2024-11-19

Attendees: Ali Smith, Daniel Wagner-Hall, Sally McGrath

❗Actions from last time

📝 Agenda points

Helping ITP team reboot the first module for ITP iteration 2 which starts in about 6 weeks

We should start thinking about reworking the first module as slightly more fundamentals-style “try this out and enroll as a trainee or drop out”.

We may want to do with on behalf of the ITP syllabus team and hand it over, as they are bandwidth-constrained.

We would probably want this to happen before we rely on people having access to their own computers.

Would probably want to keep git, which you can do on GitHub, but without Codespaces that doesn’t let you run code. These are cheap enough that we can probably pay for it. Probably ditching the terminal completely though.

Sally has acquired a poor quality trainee laptop and will experiment with it.

Do we want to time-limit the module?

Pros:

  • Encourages people to focus and pushes them to actually enroll as trainees
  • Sets the expectation of: You have to show up, put the work in, and make progress

Cons:

  • Extra pressure
  • Makes a paperwork spike of enrollment applications
  • Mismatched expectations around introducing artificial time pressure for module 1 vs trying to relieve time pressure for ITP

We probably want to set a target guideline of 4 weeks, but not enforce this. Maybe we “enforce” this by telling cohort leaders that week 5 must be working on module 2 not module 1.

Actions
  • Collaboratively put together learning objectives.
  • Rebranding the module.
  • Go through moving/removing things we think need to be removed.
  • Frame sprint 1 with specific energisers/introductions.

Renaming SDC

Daniel would quite like to rename SDC to Software Engineering for two reasons:

  1. To not need to disambiguate between “old SDC” and “new SDC”
  2. “Software engineering” contrasts nicely with “Learning programming”

Piscine dashboard requirements

Worked out in comments on https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KOl4eWF0XWS34esrkWvCE5d4ESgMrjeFWQFao404UPY/edit

❗Actions

  • All: Collaboratively put together LOs and name for ITP Introduction Module.
  • Daniel: Sync with Karen on Piscine dashboard requirements

2024-11-05

Attendees: Daniel Wagner-Hall, Mitch Lloyd, Sally McGrath

❗Actions from last time

  • Ali (Carry-over): Check in with the Dashboard team about Piscine reqs (write up a ticket for this)
  • All (Carry-over): Think about useful resources for SDC
  • Daniel: Make a bunch of tickets described above

📝 Agenda points

We had a lovely catch-up.

Some things that came up:

  • Sally is working with some Royal Holloway researchers who are researching the impact of GenAI on novice learning programmers.
  • Sally is finding AI’s influence uninspiring in her coding life.
  • In Zoom school, Sally walked through the page of a PR line by line understanding every element in the page.
    • In flipped classroom we’re maybe overlooking context setting for logistical/workflowy things like this.
    • There’s probably some good workshops in this.
  • How to handle things like playing computer with volunteers who don’t have an understanding you’d expect them to.
  • So far 15% of 117 ITP participants have completed module 1. 3-4 have dropped out.
  • Some people are racing ahead at a faster pace than the old course timing would have allowed - this is great to see.
  • Unclear what the balance will be of the slower folks between “need a bit of extra time to get going” vs “just need a bit more time for everything” vs “not actually getting things”.
  • People re-taking the course seem to be thriving - getting the culture, reviewing code, etc.
  • Fundamentals was really useful at culture-setting, we probably want to try re-framing the first ITP module as fundamentals.
  • Sally wants to release the curriculum platform with the DPG team in December.

❗Actions

2024-10-22

Attendees: Ali Smith, Daniel Wagner-Hall, Sally McGrath

❗Actions from last time

  • Daniel: Check in on availability for first round of Piscine
  • Sally: Communicate the decision about “strictness of gatekeeping” to ITP team by commenting on a ticket
  • Ali: Review Daniel’s Piscine PR
  • Sally: Come up with ideas for Ali to write up
  • Ali: Respond to feedback on Piscine PR
  • Ali: Check in with the Dashboard team about Piscine reqs (write up a ticket for this)
  • Daniel: Ask Barath to get him to post in remote-volunteering channel
  • All: Think about useful resources for SDC

📝 Agenda points

We did a big big project board clean-up and sprint-planning.

React and tracks

Three kinds of tracks:

  • Independent study tracks
  • Employer/Job/Role-focused tracks after ITP
  • Employer/Job/Role-focused tracks after SDC

Need to be clear what is a direct path to a job, and also that we won’t support poeple indefinitely to just keep doing more learning without goals.

Daniel will action this on the tracks website.

Missing Piscine prereqs

How overloaded is ITP?

  • Intro module: Can’t add anything meaningful in there.

  • Structuring and Testing Data: Pretty dense

  • Data Groups: Probably has some space

  • Data Flows: Already incredibly dense

  • Errors, error handling, and try/catch - we could probably insert this into Data Groups somewhere.

    • The concept that there are errors and they need handling in some way is more important than try/catch.

  • Working in groups

    • Breaking down a project into things that can be done in parallel
    • Merge conflicts and stuff
      • This needs to be done in a standalone project - we can’t expect people to learn anything else while they’re fighting with merge conflicts.

We should make tickets for:

  • Reduce prereqs on Piscine - remove everything from Daniel’s list not listed above.
  • ITP team to introduce errors in Data Groups
  • ITP team to introduce a group-work project in Data Groups where the desired LO is resolving merge conflicts
  • Ticket to require the object+array methods Codewars library in ITP at some point

Parsing projects for Piscine?

Probably too hard.

Sally’s Piscine project ideas

We discussed a few. Codewars leaderboard, Swatches, Speak and Spell.

Speak and Spell maybe doesn’t have enough logicy content for Piscine, but could possibly be useful for a new group project?

❗Actions

  • Ali (Carry-over): Check in with the Dashboard team about Piscine reqs (write up a ticket for this)
  • All (Carry-over): Think about useful resources for SDC
  • Daniel: Make a bunch of tickets described above

2024-10-08

Attendees: Ali, Sally, Daniel

❗Actions from last time

  • Ali (Carry-over): Write up requirements “spectrum” into a doc for discussion
  • Ali (Carry-over): Write up projects in the Piscine repo
  • Everyone (Carry-over): Think about SDC topics and resources.
  • Everyone: Think about how we may or may not want to assess people at the end of ITP to gate entry to the Piscine.
  • Daniel: Symlink all the tooling folders.
  • Everyone: Think about starter tasks for new potential team members.

📝 Agenda points

Piscine availability

  • Ali will be away for the first week of Feb
    • So first 2 weekends will be away :/
    • It just needs to start and end in Feb. Possibly could shift Piscine to last 3 weeks of Feb, so that Ali only misses 1 week rather than 2
  • Daniel to check in on other people’s availability

“Gatekeeping” in ITP

  • How strictly should volunteers enforce review requirements in ITP?
  • Decision: we shouldn’t enforce too strictly
    • It’s not the goal of ITP to be strict in assessment, that’s the goal of Piscine
      • We want ITP to be easy to re-try, give lots of chances to succeed
      • While Piscine needs to be strict so that we can be realistic when it comes to SDC
  • Will some volunteers might be “gatekeep” in ITP anyway?
    • Mostly likely yes, but we think it is better to err on the side of being overly strict than the opposite
    • This may cause some complaints from trainees about unfairness, but we can deal with this easier than unrealistic expectations in SDC

Replacing Scrimba in ITD

  • Team want to switch to freeCodeCamp
    • Possibly worth exploring other options, but don’t have other ideas currently

Resources for SDC

  • Daniel has started to divide up SDC outcomes into “stuff we should create ourselves” and “stuff we can point to other people’s existing good resources”
    • So if there is any good materials you know of, then point Daniel towards them

Volunteers confused about what to do on Saturdays

  • Sally: volunteers are asking quite a lot about what to do on a Saturday, they seem not to be reading the curriculum at all
    • We expect them not to read it in depth, but we do need them to read something
  • Should understand the prep, day plan & backlog structure enough to figure it out for themselves
  • Aside: the How This Works module is targeted at volunteers, we might want to consider an equivalent for trainees. But this is a big package of work that isn’t super high priority for us right now
  • Decision: one pager to explain the concepts, with a very obvious link on the CYF curriculum site
    • We also think it would be useful to have a memorable short link (e.g. bit.ly/what-to-do-at-cyf-on-saturdays) that can be shared on Slack

Connecting remote volunteers to mid week session support & PR reviews

  • Sally: we have a bunch of remote volunteers and opportunity to do mid-week learning sessions & PR reviews
  • Need to get Tech Ed volunteers to understand that giving PR feedback to trainees is important
    • Do new volunteers not understand the important of giving PR feedback? Or is it that they don’t know where to look (or haven’t been obviously sign-posted enough)?
      • We think it’s the latter - so we need to find ways of directing the attention that way
  • We have very low numbers of volunteers outside of London - so can’t really lean on in-person volunteers to do reviews on Saturdays - so instead we should try to lean into using remote volunteers for PR reviews
  • Lili has been gathering new remote volunteers into a Slack channel - should point ITP leaders in that direction to ask for help

❗Actions

  • Daniel(?): Check in on availability for first round of Piscine
  • ???: Communicate the decision about “strictness of gatekeeping” to ITP team by commenting on a ticket
  • Ali: Review Daniel’s Piscine PR
  • Sally: Come up with ideas for Ali to write up
  • Ali: Respond to feedback on Piscine PR
  • Ali: Check in with the Dashboard team about Piscine reqs (write up a ticket for this)
  • Daniel: Ask Barath to get him to post in remote-volunteering channel
  • All: Think about useful resources for SDC

2024-09-10

Attendees: Ali Smith, Daniel Wagner-Hall

❗Actions from last time

  • Ali (Carry-over): Write up requirements “spectrum” into a doc for discussion
  • Ali (Carry-over): Write up projects in the Piscine repo
  • Daniel (Carry-over): Finish off Piscine project
  • Everyone (Carry-over): Think about SDC topics and resources.
  • Everyone: Think about how we may want to assess people at the end of ITP to gate entry to the Piscine.
  • Daniel: Symlink all the tooling folders.
  • Sally: Put up a banner on the SDC website saying it’s under construction.

📝 Agenda points

Timings

Calendar currently suggests first Piscine is in May - think this is a mistake and it’s meant to be in February/March-ish?

Feedback from ITD First Saturday

Usual first-day chaos; generally felt good having something that felt like class!

Scrimba seem to have changed their payment model - there was a paywall in front of an important step. Ali led an in-promptu CodePen + export + publish workshop.

CodePen is a bit frustrating in that you effectively just see the body, and it hides a bunch of what actually happens under the covers.

ITD site being un-linked has pros and cons. Good that it forces people to focus on one thing at a time. Bad because if there are e.g. bugs in the ITD platform it’s hard to work around.

A surprising number of trainees showed up on Saturday without their laptops. Also unclear whether a goal of ITD is still to be able to do it with just a phone. Relatedly: What about people doing ITP who don’t have laptops, or only have Windows.

Related: We probably do want to financially support some folks through ITP if they’re making progress and are likely to succeed, but a fair up-front policy that doesn’t bankrupt us is complicated to devise.

It feels like ITD -> ITP is a good place to do some check-pointing, but unclear how.

It’s a little unclear to ITD trainees what exactly happens when ITD finishes.

CodeAcademy apparently has a regex with look-behind that crashes on older browsers. Boo!

Most people had laptops (a few didn’t). A lot of the really broken stuff was on CYF loaner laptops.

It’s no longer super clear exactly where “the course” starts, and who is a trainee now. We should firm this up. See also Sally’s proposed trainee contract.

There’s no specific day-plan, and it’s not super clear who should be reviewing steps (which needs system access).

This round (first after a long hiatus) has a very large number of participants - should we be worried about the size of the first ITP? In London so far ~50 people have made it to step 3/7. We need to work out target group sizes, and how we want to handle outcomes which are either too big or small (both of which could happen).

Barath seems a little stressed about how much there is to do in ITP and that it feels high-stakes - particularly that the whole databases piece (which we view as nice-to-have for the first round, rather than strictly required).

Starter tasks for new potential team members

We should think of some.

❗Actions

  • Ali (Carry-over): Write up requirements “spectrum” into a doc for discussion
  • Ali (Carry-over): Write up projects in the Piscine repo
  • Everyone (Carry-over): Think about SDC topics and resources.
  • Everyone: Think about how we may want to assess people at the end of ITP to gate entry to the Piscine.
  • Daniel: Symlink all the tooling folders.
  • Everyone: Think about starter tasks for new potential team members.

2024-08-27

Attendees: Daniel Wagner-Hall, Mitch Lloyd, Sally McGrath

❗Actions from last time

  • Sally (Carry-over): Think of a rubric for demo assessment.
  • Ali (Carry-over): Write up requirements “spectrum” into a doc for discussion
  • Ali (Carry-over): Write up projects in the Piscine repo
  • Daniel (Carry-over): Finish off Piscine project
  • Sally: Make render hooks don’t appear on the front page menu of the curriculum platform development.
  • Daniel: Agree a date with ITP for when Global Syllabus should do a “roughly complete” content review
  • Everyone: Think about SDC topics and resources.

📝 Agenda points

ITD is starting soon, ITP will follow!

Do we want to encourage/guide trainee tracking into ITP?

Is 12 weeks a good period of time for people to invest before getting their first meaningful feedback?

Ideally we would give meaningful feedback sooner, but we’ve acknowledged we don’t have the volunteer bandwidth to meaningfully provide faster feedback.

Do we want an assessment of some kind to show someone has completed ITP?

The function extraction Codility is a signal about progressing to Piscine, not about having completed ITP.

Some people may blitz through the course - ideally we would have a somewhat objective way of testing this that doesn’t require e.g. someone manually reviewing 3 months of coursework.

We should muse on this…

Piscine wrap-up

Discussed proposed demo rubric - generally looks good.

What will we do if either Piscine gives poor signal, or ITP doesn’t produce enough people who can get through the Piscine?

We should aim to keep our intended standards high, and not lower the bar just to make progress. But acknowledge our tests may not provide good signal about our intended standards.

We may need to prepare to set up a global SDC, in case we end up with too small numbers in each region to set up full SDC classes in each region.

Regular ITPs and Piscines should help to recover in case people need extra time/support, rather than needing to wait a year to make more progress.

Plan for syncing ITD into a curriculum site

Syncing JSON into Hugo should be easy, but auth is hard.

Whenever we can get auth taken off of the relevant API endpoints, we will just have the Hugo pull in the data as JSON.

Trying to get our trainees having more low-stakes conversations with potential employers

Daniel has a friend who went to a bootcamp who found it really useful to have regular (~monthly) low-stakes conversations with potential employers, mostly in a social context. This was useful to:

  1. Have low-stakes conversations with employers before a high-stakes interview.
  2. Get used to talking to employers.
  3. Give an opportunity to make some awkward social errors in a low-stakes contexts rather than in interviews.

Mariana may have a monthly meet-up thing going on that could be relevant here.

De-duplicating config across our many sites

Things which are duplicated (in the tooling folder of each site):

  • Clone button functions.
  • Even though there’s a netlify.toml, many of the settings (e.g. the Go version, the Hugo version) still need setting independently on each site.

Symlinks should rescue us. Daniel will try to do so.

We’re aiming to have deploy previews for “just the thing that you actually affected”, but this may not be set up right - feel free to tweak as convenient.

❗Actions

  • Ali (Carry-over): Write up requirements “spectrum” into a doc for discussion
  • Ali (Carry-over): Write up projects in the Piscine repo
  • Daniel (Carry-over): Finish off Piscine project
  • Everyone (Carry-over): Think about SDC topics and resources.
  • Everyone: Think about how we may want to assess people at the end of ITP to gate entry to the Piscine.
  • Daniel: Symlink all the tooling folders.
  • Sally: Put up a banner on the SDC website saying it’s under construction.

2024-08-13

Attendees: Daniel Wagner-Hall, Mitch Lloyd, Sally McGrath

❗Actions from last time

  • Sally: Think of a rubric for demo assessment.
  • Sally: Try to chat to someone at GitHub about rate limits.
  • Ali: Write up requirements “spectrum” into a doc for discussion
  • Ali: Write up projects in the Piscine repo
  • Daniel: Finish off Piscine project

📝 Agenda points

Introducing reading to SDC

Some books we’re considering adding (parts of) to SDC:

  • How Computers Really Work (Matthew Justice)
  • What If? (Randall Munro)
  • Algorithms to Live By (Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths)
  • The Phoenix Project

On Algorithms to Live By:

Daniel: Really like the idea, the language is a little overly complicated, like that each chapter is roughly standalone, the chapters are 2-3x as long as I’d like but maybe we can allocate partial chapters.

Recommendations to explore from Mitch:

Curriculum revamp

ITD is starting in September (Hopefully in: London, NW, Sheffield). See also schedule planning spreadsheet

Curriculum platform documentation

https://common.codeyourfuture.io/ exists!

Also it now has a math/LaTeX hook, and a Jupyter notebook block somewhere.

Bug: Render hooks don’t appear on the front page menu.

Launch Module

The launch module completed! Seems to have gone well, and people are writing meaningful feedback for our trainees. The volunteers had no previous relationship with the trainees they were reviewing.

Plan is to run another in October.

❗Actions

  • Sally (Carry-over): Think of a rubric for demo assessment.
  • Ali (Carry-over): Write up requirements “spectrum” into a doc for discussion
  • Ali (Carry-over): Write up projects in the Piscine repo
  • Daniel (Carry-over): Finish off Piscine project
  • Sally: Make render hooks don’t appear on the front page menu of the curriculum platform development.
  • Daniel: Agree a date with ITP for when Global Syllabus should do a “roughly complete” content review
  • Everyone: Think about SDC topics and resources.

2024-07-23

Attendees: Ali Smith, Daniel Wagner-Hall, Lizhen Xu, Mitch Lloyd, Sally McGrath

❗Actions from last time

📝 Agenda points

Introducing Lizhen

Lizhen runs HYF Belgium - welcome to the call!

(Round of intros)

(Description of the Piscine)

There will be a meet-up of folks in Barcelona in October, and hopefully in Brussels some time thereafter too.

Migracode have a curriculum now.

Was expecting more HYF folks to join the call, but they didn’t - will try to arrange again for the future!

Review dashboard requirements for Piscine

Proposed user stories.

Most things in the dashboard are configurable via UI (rather than requiring custom code).

Building blocks of the dashboard are basically “Submit link / upload file”, which covers most of what we need.

Would be good to split things into “hard requirements” vs “nice to have - we can work around manually for a while if needed”.

Review draft application form for Piscine

Draft application form.

A lot of our trainees who struggle in general struggle with filling in an application form - this is a useful filter. We want people to apply to the Piscine, and then we will automatically invite successful candidates to SDC.

Probably want questions for each of the criteria of the Piscine which isn’t covered in the Piscine (e.g. B2 English, Functional Maths).

Long-term we want to fold the application process into the dashboard rather than having a separate Google Form, but that’s not going to happen in our timeline so we’re doing a separate form for now.

ITP -> Piscine is the only place we currently want to enforce a “you can’t just automatically progress” gate.

Review draft Piscine day plans, backlog, etc

Tracking issue

Project board

Sally’s week of handling rate limits

We added caching to the issue fetching proxy.

We reworked how API calls are made from the curriculum in general.

PD is now mounted as a remote module rather than a in-line API calls.

Everything works now.

Next is probably to pre-build a module that builds a static cache of all our API calls that can be mounted. But not now.

(Also, FYI, fine-grained access tokens, even though they can be “owned” by users other than the user who generated it, are still rate-limit billed to the creating user).

Piscine projects

Should live in a projects folder in https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/The-Piscine

Let’s ban CSS, rather than trying to prosaically describe “don’t make it pretty”.

Maybe a game would be a nice third pillar beyond “data” and “app logic”.

❗Actions

  • Sally: Think of a rubric for demo assessment.
  • Sally: Try to chat to someone at GitHub about rate limits.
  • Ali: Write up requirements “spectrum” into a doc for discussion
  • Ali: Write up projects in the Piscine repo
  • Daniel: Finish off Piscine project

2024-06-18

Attendees: Daniel Wagner-Hall, Mitch Lloyd, Sally McGrath

❗Actions from last time

📝 Agenda points

ITP Progress

Seems to be going well so far

Barath has invited us all as optional to the team meetings - would appreciate drive-by context where possible.

Barath will be at the summit, and wants to hold a curriculum development and content evaluation session.

Suggestion: Separate specification from curriculum.

Mitch: Want to restructure courses doc to centre around contract between courses, and numbers (target: intake, % retention, frequency).

Piscine Projects

AI for Daniel: Add a “tl;dr: Explain what you’re looking for” at the top

See discussions from https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/curriculum/pull/748#issuecomment-2176688182

❗Actions

2024-06-04

Attendees

  • Sally McGrath - Director of Programme at CYF - Who we teach, what we teach, how we teach, how we test that. Ex-volunteer (NW), and formerly a full-time developer.
  • Kirill Kovzel - Quite recent volunteer, full-time frontend developer.
  • Ali Smith - Syllabus team, volunteer since London Class 2, full-time Engineering Manager at Overleaf, wrote the React course.
  • Sherif Eid - Volunteer since 2023-04 mostly with London 10 - been teaching and mentoring, excited to contribute to the syllabus particularly around programming fundamentals. Day-to-day a software engineer working on backend systems.
  • Jack Rogers - Volunteer for a few months, day job is full-stack engineer at ?Iris in trading.
  • Mark Wainwright - Volunteer on PD syllabus team for the last ~year helping build a lot of the syllabus. 23 years at IBM working on middleware (Java, architecture, tests, project management, …), 12 years as an agile coach, and now retired, but doesn’t want to stop coding. Interested in the interplay between tech and PD.
  • Gary Lei - Volunteer for a few months in NW, excited to help out ideally remotely, but about to start a new job. Experience with C#, electronic engineering degree, and experience playing around with hardware.
  • Jay Mayer - Volunteering since summer 2023 with NW6 - NW6 is wrapping up, so looking for next opporunities to get involved. Day-to-day a full-stack developer mostly Java in a bank.
  • Folasayo Agunbiade - Joined a few weeks ago. Masters in data science, and working as a data analyst. Also work as an assistant instructor teaching data science with Code First Girls, and looking for space to get involved.
  • Mitch Lloyd - Works on the tech ed team, working on curriculum material and teaching. Previously a volunteer in the NW, and a software engineer.
  • Zachee Niyokwizera - Full-stack developer, lead instructor teaching Python at Code First Girls, last year led the cohort in South Africa.
  • Caroline Scherf - Joined London last month, working in tech for 4 years (project manager -> software engineer, just started at Neo4J) - mostly cloud + Go.
  • Zsolt Sztupak - Joined CYF last January as part of in-person coach for GLA6 and joined with the Syllabus team end of last year to help with upgrading the Full Stack Assessment based on feedback from GLA6/LON10.
  • Fuad Sohly - In Edinburgh, joined Glasgow about a month ago, excited to volunteer in Glasgow and to contribute to the syllabus. Working as a tutor for frontend development.
  • Daniel Wagner-Hall - CYF volunteer for 4-5 years, gone through many roles (teacher, TA, buddy, curriculum). Day-to-day a software engineer (who likes Rust a lot)
  • Barath Vignarajah - Volunteer for ~3 years - worked with the old syllabus and new. Background in Java backend development.

Splitting the course/group up

General approach: Each course needs 2 leaders (at least one with CYF experience). We don’t have much structure of project management - people need to drive things themselves. See course plans doc for goals and team sign-ups.

ITD exists and needs a bit of revision. Leaders: Zachee + Fuad. We stopped running new classes last year because of the tech employment crisis, but we need to get the funnel started again soon.

ITP Leaders: Barath + Caroline. Has a longer time-line, but the course needs always work/improvement.

CYF does not have a need for content - we don’t need people to just write content for other people to deliver. There’s a lot of content (both at CYF and around - MIT, Stanford, Harvard, FreeCodeCamp, Udemy, …). What we need is delivery of programmes to actual people, and evaluation (and improvement) of that delivery. We’re not here to develop a plan and let other people implement it - we’re here to design + deliver + iterate.

CYF Pedagogy

  • Flipped classroom - trainees are expected to prepare before coming to class - promotes independence, self-education. See also How Our Curriculum Works.
  • As developers, we are problem solvers - but to develop new problem solvers it’s important we don’t solve problems for people - they need to tackle things themselves.
  • Be honest about what you think about people’s abilities - sometimes that’s hard in the moment, but it’s the most fair thing. It’s more fair and kind for people to realise software isn’t for them as early as they can if that’s the case, rather than wasting their time.
  • Focus - we set up the syllabus team specifically to be able to step back from class and focus a bit. Make sure to set things up so that there are people who can focus on day-to-day issues, and people who can step back and think about what we’re teaching and how, because otherwise there will always be too many distractions to focus on either.
  • Value - everything we ask people to do needs to be of value to themselves.

Expectations of the courses

The goals of ITP are for people to work out, in a quick and low-commitment way, whether programming is for them, and whether they want to enroll on a higher-commitment course afterwards.

We probably need:

ITD: about 1000-2000 people in a year. Probably about 6x per year, so about 200 per run, expecting a 90% drop-off based on previous runs.

ITP: about 200-400 people in a year. Probably 3-4x per year. Could be running in cohorts or self-paced. Probably self-paced but to be decided by the ITP team.

Piscine (a month of testing abilities and motivations in software - from https://42.fr/en/admissions/42-piscine/): 100-300 people in a year. Probably 4x per year.

SDC: 80-100. Hopefully 3-4x per year.

There’s a change of expectation here - previously “the course” was expected to end in a job, but now the earlier courses are explicitly not expected to end in a job. We need to think carefully about what skills we’re giving people and whether/how they’re useful - writing a CV may be generally useful to people getting jobs (good to do!) but may not help you decide whether software is for you (bad!) - there are trade-offs there. Similarly, we should think about what order we teach things (e.g. learning about databases early may be useful because it may be a transferrable skill into spreadsheets in many jobs other than software).

Want to avoid gluts of trainees all looking for the same jobs at the same time - ideally smaller batches of people at a time.

Ideally we want lots of opportunities for people to take more time and join a future cohort if needed. “Come back next year” is a lot of pressure if someone is behind for whatever reason or needs to take some time. “Come back next month” is a lot easier.

What’s the future of regions? That’s a great question for us to work out together!

In the SDC we will be teaching for roles we are confident people can get hired into. This probably isn’t just general entry-level full-stack web development, and may cover many different roles.

As an example, we put together material for CYF+ to prepare people for jobs as Site Reliability Engineers at Slack - putting together https://systems.codeyourfuture.io/ mostly by collecting existing material (and writing projects, introductions, and extra material as needed) and it was successful.

Entry/exit criteria

How will we gate who goes from each stage to the next? Following courses (e.g. ITP) will give learning objectives and requirements to the earlier courses (e.g. ITD). Evaluation of people finishing one course is the responsibility of the people running the next course. It’s a contract model.

How should teams run?

Set up a slack channel, decide on a schedule for meetings (maybe weekly or fortnightly), aim for everyone to come to every meeting, and agree how your team is going to work.

Note that all of the syllabus team are Slack and GitHub admins - reach out if you need support.

2024-05-07

Attendees: Daniel Wagner-Hall, Mitch Lloyd, Sally McGrath

❗Actions from last time

  • Leila: Prepare some code review guidelines and examples of good / bad code reviews and gather into a single source of truth
  • Everyone: Review https://curriculum.codeyourfuture.io/how-our-curriculum-works/ and add stuff
  • Isar (Carry-over): Triage JS1+JS2 Iteration and Snagging issues - add any needed to the MigraCode milestone
  • Sally (Carry-over): Fix the archetypes in the curriculum

📝 Agenda points

HackYourFuture Denmark

… will probably join us in a meeting or two

They’re thinking of re-working their curriculum and want to talk.

Breaking up and goal-setting for new module groupings

In https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a-27M-O8gxE8F-FGAtGhLlkahkrYgnUxnURaJ8oSoow/edit

❗Actions

  • Sally/Lili: Find a volunteer to own ITD
  • Leila (Carry-over): Prepare some code review guidelines and examples of good / bad code reviews and gather into a single source of truth
  • Everyone (Carry-over): Review https://curriculum.codeyourfuture.io/how-our-curriculum-works/ and add stuff
  • Isar (Carry-over): Triage JS1+JS2 Iteration and Snagging issues - add any needed to the MigraCode milestone
  • Sally (Carry-over): Fix the archetypes in the curriculum

2024-04-23

Attendees: Ali, Daniel, Sally, Leila

❗Actions from last time

  • Daniel: Check in with Leila and Yun about code review
  • Everyone: Review https://curriculum.codeyourfuture.io/how-our-curriculum-works/ and add stuff
  • Isar (Carry-over): Triage JS1+JS2 Iteration and Snagging issues - add any needed to the MigraCode milestone
  • Leila + Yun (Carry-over): Describe good code review (possibly via examples of good code review Leila has received).
  • Leila (Carry-over): Find existing code reviewers and understand their experience
  • Ali (Carry-over): Add to discussion thread about contributing to OSS projects as part of Portfolio module
  • Sally (Carry-over): Fix the archetypes in the curriculum

📝 Agenda points

Sprint planning

  • Sally’s proposed Portfolio project
    • People didn’t feel that they have a driver to diversify their portfolio (e.g. try picking up a new library/language)
    • Based around the TV Show Project
      • Which is built around user stories/acceptance criteria
    • Suggested steps:
      • Rewrite the TV Show Project in TypeScript
      • Identify the gap between previous iteration (i.e. in JS) and TS
      • Reflect on what did trainees need to learn to achieve this
      • Rebuild in Python
      • Reflect again on what did trainees need to learn to learn this
      • Etc
    • Ali: I really like this model, it feels like a healthy “push out the door”
      • Historically, a Redux module has been requested but we deliberately never implemented it specifically for this reason
    • Ali: small risk of keen-on-Python volunteers turning this into a “learn Python from the ground up” module
      • Daniel: suggest delivering a project within a short timebox to make it clear that we want to focus on the simple outcome rather than the specifics in depth
  • Cloud module budget limit
    • This is important as trainees may end up accidentally spending money through AWS without realising
    • There’s a bit of a time crunch as we’d like to get this done before WM get to it (roughly about a month)
    • None of us really feel qualified to write this ourselves, so we want to go in person in London to bug Pedro or Lorenzo to write this

Code review

  • Leila has been looking into how do we approach code review
  • Created a survey
    • Had 9 responses, shared with the Tech Ed syllabus team
  • Need to determine active people who are interested in this problem, then could create a channel to discuss
  • Prepare some code review guidelines and examples of good / bad code reviews
    • Can we reuse some old bits of content that we’ve written about this before?
      • Might be coupled to the old syllabus - so potentially difficult to reuse
  • General advice: try to simplify and put it all in a single source of truth

Presentation of tracks in the curriculum site

  • Daniel: Previously we had a strictly ordered curriculum, now there’s perhaps a bit less clarity on ordering
    • Restyled the homepage of the curriculum to include “Tracks”, covering previous content such as React (Frameworks) and Node (Servers), but now also includes historically “out-of-band” modules such as Cloud
    • We also CYF+ which may be merged into the curriculum
  • Sally: Let’s wait and see how this works itself out

Kay Lack’s essay

  • Sally: Recommended reading What’s up with the job market for bootcamp grads in the UK? by Kay Lack (previously Chief Education Officer at Makers)
    • Also includes a video, which is also recommended, particularly for trainees
  • The number of web developer / JavaScript jobs is down significantly compared to the last 2 years, according to ITJobsWatch
    • There’s been a crash in the market
  • Hardest hit markets: Juniors, React, DEI in general - which is our main brand positioning
  • We’ve tried to do Town Halls/Portfolio module to boost applications for current trainees but the realistic position is that we’re vulnerable
  • The positive side: CYF doesn’t have large overheads, we can turn off signups for a while - unlike paid code schools
  • Sally: We need to be realistic with trainees/volunteers when it’s brought up
    • Volunteers aren’t necessarily feeling the bite of the current market conditions so may be carrying on with previous mindset
  • Sally: have some ideas about future direction, will be looking to share this over the next while

❗Actions

  • Leila: Prepare some code review guidelines and examples of good / bad code reviews and gather into a single source of truth
  • Everyone: Review https://curriculum.codeyourfuture.io/how-our-curriculum-works/ and add stuff
  • Isar (Carry-over): Triage JS1+JS2 Iteration and Snagging issues - add any needed to the MigraCode milestone
  • Sally (Carry-over): Fix the archetypes in the curriculum

2024-04-09

Attendees: Ali Smith, Daniel Wagner-Hall, Mitch Lloyd, Sally McGrath

❗Actions from last time

  • Isar (Carry-over): Triage JS1+JS2 Iteration and Snagging issues - add any needed to the MigraCode milestone
  • Leila + Yun (Carry-over): Describe good code review (possibly via examples of good code review Leila has received).
  • Leila (Carry-over): Find existing code reviewers and understand their experience
  • Anyone (Carry-over): Write up a ticket to check servers PR after merging
  • Anyone (Carry-over): Write up a ticket for review the Node module in general now that we’ve landed the PRs
  • Ali (Carry-over): Add to discussion thread about contributing to OSS projects as part of Portfolio module
  • Sally: Fix the archetypes in the curriculum
  • Sally: Write a ticket to explore alternative frontend views
  • Isar: Try to get MigraCode deployed on Netlify

📝 Agenda points

Full-Stack Assessment and Databases

The Launch is becoming something that’s applied to (see WIP application form) - full-stack assessment will be the last gate before this, so will be increasingly important (and we need to instill this in volunteers’ minds).

Development/improvements seem to be going well (thanks Zsolt!). Excited to see how it goes with trainees soon.

How Our Curriculum Works

https://curriculum.codeyourfuture.io/how-our-curriculum-works/ is getting exciting! We should all review it, work on it and add some tasks.

https://curriculum.codeyourfuture.io/how-our-curriculum-works/sprints/self-educate/backlog/ is a list of self-driven tasks for new volunteers to get to understand the community and curriculum.

Several people have ideas about tasks to add - we should add them.

The success page is currently missing its content - think Mitch has found a bug - see https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/curriculum/pull/679#issuecomment-2045644323 (which hopefully Mitch will fix).

Daniel wants to use this as a convenient way to inject a few “Go find an experienced volunteer and get some teaching/community advice” exercises. Most volunteers when they first start are aware they have gaps in knowledge and experience, and are very open to advice!

Some discussion of volunteer roles:

  • Ideally we don’t want to introduce “roles with responsibilities” because we’ve seen this tends to discourage other people from also fulfilling those responsibilities.
  • But there is a difference in the experience across volunteers, and we want to make the most of our most experienced people. Guiding people to do things like “Find a volunteer who has volunteered with two cohorts and ask them about X” or “Talk to one of (list of named people) about Y” are very reasonable.
  • Instilling in some experienced people “It would be great if you could look after volunteers as well as trainees”, as well as setting new volunteers tasks of meeting and talking to experienced volunteers, can help to approach the problem from both ends.

❗Actions

  • Daniel: Check in with Leila and Yun about code review
  • Everyone: Review https://curriculum.codeyourfuture.io/how-our-curriculum-works/ and add stuff
  • Isar (Carry-over): Triage JS1+JS2 Iteration and Snagging issues - add any needed to the MigraCode milestone
  • Leila + Yun (Carry-over): Describe good code review (possibly via examples of good code review Leila has received).
  • Leila (Carry-over): Find existing code reviewers and understand their experience
  • Ali (Carry-over): Add to discussion thread about contributing to OSS projects as part of Portfolio module
  • Sally (Carry-over): Fix the archetypes in the curriculum

2024-03-26

Attendees: Ali, Sally, Mitch, Isar

❗Actions from last time

  • Isar (Carry-over): Triage JS1+JS2 Iteration and Snagging issues - add any needed to the MigraCode milestone
  • Leila + Yun (Carry-over): Describe good code review (possibly via examples of good code review Leila has received).
  • Leila (Carry-over): Find existing code reviewers and understand their experience
  • Anyone (Carry-over): Write up a ticket to check servers PR after merging
  • Anyone (Carry-over): Write up a ticket for review the Node module in general now that we’ve landed the PRs
  • Ali (Carry-over): Add to discussion thread about contributing to OSS projects as part of Portfolio module
  • Sally: Fix the archetypes in the curriculum
  • Sally: Write a ticket to explore alternative frontend views
  • Isar: Try to get MigraCode deployed on Netlify

📝 Agenda points

Activity taxonomy

  • Came up via Sprint Planning, see Sally’s PR to add activity taxonomies
  • Adds metadata to blocks
    • Revealed through double click
    • Shows learning objectives and new activity taxonomies
    • Activities can be effectively applied to a block like labels/tags
  • Activities were based on a Google Doc
  • Discussion of how activity taxonomies can be used
    • Ali: could these be used a guide for people looking to write new content? I.e. here are a bunch of activities that you should be following (with a free text fallback activity)
    • Discussed how they’re also useful

Renaming the “How our curriculum works” module

  • Ali: it’s a quite long and unwieldy name, can we come up with an alternative?
  • Some suggestions from the call: Teaching, Learning
  • Let’s brainstorm to come up with alternative suggestions

Curriculum PR description template

  • Ali: there’s some things on the PR template that are a bit confusing (for old timers and newcomers), can we clean it up a bit and add descriptive comments?
  • Sally made a PR 🙂

MigraCode theme copy missing content

  • Isar: last week was the first week using the new content at MigraCode
    • Deployed the new iteration to MC Netlify first time
  • Noticed that there was some content missing on a day plan page
    • Suspects some issue with configuration
    • No build logs
  • Isar to write up a ticket to investigate
  • How did the first week go?
    • A bit rocky at the start but noticed that trainees had more time spent with their hands on the keyboards

Build failures

  • There seem to have been quite a few build failures recently (all PRs currently seem to be failing)
  • Sally: think it’s because of the docs failing our tests
    • Thought the docs were disconnected because we’re not really using them right now - but apparently not

New homepage

  • Sally demoed the new curriculum homepage
    • Summary: split into various columns (where there are either checkpoints currently or we are considering adding them in the future)
  • We like that it recognises the “hidden” structure that generally Syllabus Team know about, but probably not many other people know about
  • Also have a PR to add prerequisites metadata to modules
    • Looking at tying this into micro-credentials possibly in the future - arranging the code ahead of this
  • Also had an aside about making the page more editable (as exercises) for trainees - showed an example of modifying colours programmatically
  • Ali: Can we add better “descriptions” (shown on hover) for the modules?

UN prize

  • We’ve been nominated for a prize from the UN!
    • WSIS Prizes 2024, in the “C7: ICT applications: benefits in all aspects of life — E-employment” category
  • You can vote for us!

❗Actions

  • Isar (Carry-over): Triage JS1+JS2 Iteration and Snagging issues - add any needed to the MigraCode milestone
  • Leila + Yun (Carry-over): Describe good code review (possibly via examples of good code review Leila has received).
  • Leila (Carry-over): Find existing code reviewers and understand their experience
  • Anyone (Carry-over): Write up a ticket to check servers PR after merging
  • Anyone (Carry-over): Write up a ticket for review the Node module in general now that we’ve landed the PRs
  • Ali (Carry-over): Add to discussion thread about contributing to OSS projects as part of Portfolio module
  • Sally: Fix the archetypes in the curriculum
  • Isar: Try to get MigraCode deployed on Netlify
  • Ali: Create Slack thread to brainstorm ideas for “How our curriculum works” module name
  • Isar: Write up a ticket to investigate why the MC deploy hasn’t fully worked
  • Ali: Write up ticket for improving module descriptions

2024-03-12

Attendees: Ali, Isar, Mitch, Sally

❗Actions from last time

  • Isar (Carry-over): Triage JS1+JS2 Iteration and Snagging issues - add any needed to the MigraCode milestone
  • Leila + Yun (Carry-over): Describe good code review (possibly via examples of good code review Leila has received).
  • Leila (Carry-over): Find existing code reviewers and understand their experience
  • Anyone (Carry-over): Write up a ticket to check servers PR after merging
  • Anyone (Carry-over): Write up a ticket for review the Node module in general now that we’ve landed the PRs
  • Zsolt (Carry-over): Figure out what deadlines for landing deployment guide PRs
  • Ali (Carry-over): Add to discussion thread about contributing to OSS projects as part of Portfolio module

Actions from 27/02/2024:

  • Mitch: Review the cloud module
  • Mitch: Capture problems on the curriculum project board
  • Sally: Fix the archetypes in the curriculum
  • Sally: Write a ticket to explore alternative frontend views
  • Isar: Book a call with Sally to discuss module translation for PHP/multi-lingual websites

📝 Agenda points

Planning

  • We’re low on capacity at the moment
  • We should focus onreviewing

How the curriculum works

  • Come out of the PD(?) team, long standing
  • New volunteers don’t know how to use the curriculum effectively
    • Includes new volunteers and older
  • Curriculum has lots of stuff, so it’s hard to interpret how to read and use it
    • Planning sessions
    • Provide learning materials
    • etc
  • Mitch’s 3 challenges - useful framing
    • Self education
    • Self coordination
    • Self evaluation
  • Mitch’s idea
    • Module built on top of the curriculum
    • Goal is to be like teaching trainees - self-taught, at home “study”
    • Module split into 3 sections - based on the 3 challenges above (self-education, -coordination, -evaluation)
    • Sally’s feedback: it should have the same “sub-structure” as the trainee modules
      • Prep/backlog/day plan/success
      • Day plan - do we intend for volunteers to do something in class?
        • Yes, we want volunteers to come to class whenever possible
          • Most engaged when interacting with classes
          • One of the main problems we have currently is that volunteers who’ve just onboarded just hang out on Slack, and don’t have signposts towards more engaging work (e.g. coming to class). Giving them something specific to follow will help
        • What would they do? (While a class is running)
          • Talking with volunteers/trainees
          • Participating in teaching
          • Lunch!
        • Can’t be dependent on CYF staff - already have too many people to talk to, so have to find a way
          • Can be it dependent on specific “roles” of volunteers? Maybe eventually but we don’t really have this
        • We want to have different things happening in parallel
  • Ties really well into the training club discussions
    • Discussion Notes
    • One of main takeaways from this is that we should use our experience of teaching trainees to “teach” volunteers too
  • Do we plan to point trainees at this module too?
    • Tl;dr: yes
    • Can reuse some of the materials in Fundamentals
      • Should be easy to share using the new curriculum system
      • But maybe not all materials - some won’t much sense to trainees
    • It’s important to get both trainees and volunteers into the “CYF way” (flipped classroom, Mitch’s 3 challenges above)

MigraCode Netlify

  • Sally: gave some instructions on getting MigraCode deployed via Netlify:
    • make a new site, add the curriculum repo, copy the deployment config from cyf
    • change the folder from cyf to mcb
    • add your custom domain

❗Actions

  • Isar (Carry-over): Triage JS1+JS2 Iteration and Snagging issues - add any needed to the MigraCode milestone
  • Leila + Yun (Carry-over): Describe good code review (possibly via examples of good code review Leila has received).
  • Leila (Carry-over): Find existing code reviewers and understand their experience
  • Anyone (Carry-over): Write up a ticket to check servers PR after merging
  • Anyone (Carry-over): Write up a ticket for review the Node module in general now that we’ve landed the PRs
  • Zsolt (Carry-over): Figure out what deadlines for landing deployment guide PRs
  • Ali (Carry-over): Add to discussion thread about contributing to OSS projects as part of Portfolio module
  • Sally: Fix the archetypes in the curriculum
  • Sally: Write a ticket to explore alternative frontend views
  • Isar: Try to get MigraCode deployed on Netlify

2024-02-27

Attendees: Mitch, Sally, Daniel, Issar, Lorenzo (for cloud updates)

❗Actions from last time

📝 Agenda points

🌩️ Cloud course materials updates

  • One current goal is to capture work in the existing cloud moduke fork and get it into the new curriculum
  • Sally has translated the cloud module into the new CYF curriculum here: https://deploy-preview-565--cyf-curriculum.netlify.app/cloud/
  • Sally has also translated the coursework into tickets available on a Github project board: https://github.com/orgs/CodeYourFuture/projects/151/views/1
  • Lorenzo: Keen to merge the cloud module - most likely a good starting point
  • Let’s do a cursory review of this module and get it merged - then we can iterate!
  • Lorenzo wanted to know more about the tone of the cloud module
  • Prep material is similar to the current curriculum
  • Need to think more about what the day plans look like. Currently day plans contain activities like structured group discussion, here is an example: group discussion.

📝 Flipped classroom: problems and insights

  • Mitch to organise a panel of experts style in-depth discussion to explore and learn more about flipped classroom. Particularly relevant for Migracode and the new Sheffield volunteers

📊 NW6 progress report

🎯 Issues, problems and goals

  • Let’s talk about issues, problems and goals
  • Daniel: Curious to learn more about how different cities are using the day plan
  • How are people using it? How do we frame its use?
  • Desired: Group projects earlier - learning about merge conflicts earlier
  • Daniel: Missing thread: Why do we have a frontend, a backend and a database. Servers module doesn’t address this question.
  • Regions where we’re about to launch: MCR - different organisation and Sheffield where there is no staff!
  • Need to reality test everything we’ve built in different regions (and countries!)
  • Need to also think about the HTML module
  • Sally: Can we cut the course in half from JS3 onwards?
  • Sally: Move SQL to the front of the course?
  • Sally: Can we collaborate with PD to improve both the curriculum?
  • Daniel: (🧩 problem) - Some trainees aren’t learning an underlying approach to solve a problem and then applying it to similar problems - evidence arising in JS2 modules 3 & 4
  • There is now a feedback button the curriculum website: https://curriculum.codeyourfuture.io/databases/sprints/1/prep/#prep-working-software-and-done
  • Would be desirable to team up with PD to address the pressing questions and improve the curriculum further!
  • Here is some prior feedback from Sally on some PD-related issues 🫱 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bSOo4WI0EsgPF7lvjkv5Vrn-J4uraHKEWQHw2dK6hGA/edit

📝 New modules for Migracode

  • Issar: Migracode are creating new modules!
  • Migracode SDC has been postponed to May/June as they’ve got more funding for 2 standalone courses
  • One course is PHP and the other is developing mult-lingual websites. Courses are specified by the Spanish government (3 hour written content, 7 hour practical content)
  • Issar and Ali + 2 more volunteers will be translating the Spanish government’s resources into the CYF curriculum format
  • Who is accepted on these 2 modules? Graduates and some folks from an employment platform used in Spain
  • Don’t need to add a module into the timeline view. Can still create the module
  • With the proliferation of modules, there’s a need to consider a visual break at the end of JS3 - to signal there are lots of different paths from that point onwards

😄 Emoji feedback

  • Sally: We’re collecting emoji feedback on the coursework 🫱 https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/Module-Cloud/issues/28
  • Recent feedback identified certain tasks where there was nowhere near enough time to complete the task
  • But some pieces of work are clearly feasible within the time limit
  • Emojis will be a useful way of collecting data
  • We can also do grad polling in the future too

❗Actions

  • Isar (Carry-over): Triage JS1+JS2 Iteration and Snagging issues - add any needed to the MigraCode milestone
  • Leila + Yun (Carry-over): Describe good code review (possibly via examples of good code review Leila has received).
  • Leila (Carry-over): Find existing code reviewers and understand their experience
  • Anyone (Carry-over): Write up a ticket to check servers PR after merging
  • Anyone (Carry-over): Write up a ticket for review the Node module in general now that we’ve landed the PRs
  • Zsolt (Carry-over): Figure out what deadlines for landing deployment guide PRs
  • Ali (Carry-over): Add to discussion thread about contributing to OSS projects as part of Portfolio module

#### Actions from 27/02/2024

  • Mitch: Review the cloud module
  • Mitch: Capture problems on the curriculum project board
  • Sally: Fix the archetypes in the curriculum
  • Sally: Write a ticket to explore alternative frontend views
  • Issar: Book a call with Sally to discuss module translation for PHP/multi-lingual websites

2024-02-13

Attendees: Sally, Daniel, Ali, Zsolt

❗Actions from last time

  • Sally: Update https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/curriculum/issues/352 to say what needs to be reviewed
  • Daniel (Carry-over): Update reminder message around new meeting format
  • Isar (Carry-over): Triage JS1+JS2 Iteration and Snagging issues - add any needed to the MigraCode milestone
  • Ali Smith (Carry-over): Review all of Sally’s React and Node workshop migrations
    • Not going to get to this, so will drop it
  • Leila + Yun: Describe good code review (possibly via examples of good code review Leila has received).
  • Leila: Find existing code reviewers and understand their experience.
  • Mitch: Get MCB volunteers on-boarded onto Slack

📝 Agenda points

Cloud module

  • Currently being taught in London
  • Hopeful that once the module in London is complete then we can get the teachers in a room to pull together into the curriculum
  • The module is currently hanging out in a PR waiting for them to respond

Reviewing PRs

  • The Node workshop PRs have landed, we can review after the fact
  • Have quite a lot of stuff to review - let’s prioritise!
  • Zsolt’s PRs
    • Priority on merging the Netlify guide(s) - as these are more likely to be used first by trainees
    • Proposed priority order: Netlify, Supabase, Render, Full stack assessment
  • Zsolt to try to figure out what deadlines we have - what will be picked up by trainees first

Greg Wilson’s SQL tutorial

  • Ali: This is more of an FYI, but I noticed that Greg Wilson (of TTT fame) has been working on a SQL tutorial/lesson: https://gvwilson.github.io/sql-tutorial/
  • Do we want to use this/take inspiration from it? (No one had read it yet, so still an open question 🙂)
  • Daniel: Observation that it’s very long! In contrast to the decision we made with the curriculum to split up into multiple “pages”
    • Ali: I suspect this is a bit of a quick and dirty experiment so perhaps not much thought put into that
  • Brief discussion of putting adding a problem solving-focused SQL module at the start of the course
    • Sally: Can we schedule in a curriculum design to discuss this for the future

Outreachy

  • Ali: again a bit of an FYI that Outreachy (https://www.outreachy.org/) is a non-profit(?) that arranges “internships” in open source software (OSS) projects
  • Sally: Have already done a collaboration in the past, but didn’t seem to lead to much for the people involved
  • Sally: Could we include contributing to OSS as part of the curriculum?
    • The curriculum itself is OSS so an obvious “safe” project to contribute to
    • Sally has set up stuff around this https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/First-Timers-Project
    • Generally we think OSS funding isn’t great so unlikely to be able to support trainees properly
      • We think there may also be potential minefields around rights to work
    • We think that trainees will need support with contributing to OSS
      • Trainees don’t understand how OSS uses Github, and OSS has a reputation for being unfriendly for new comers
  • Would we ever consider “out-sourcing” our Launch projects to a third party?
    • Sally: What are the goals of Launch projects?
      • Represent a goal for trainees, with clear expectations
      • Useful for recruiting volunteers
      • Gates graduation
        • Useful feedback vector for trainees
        • Maintains a quality perception of a CYF graduation cert
      • Daniel: Are a “comfortable” place to fail, especially compared with OSS projects
      • Because of these reasons, it doesn’t seem like a good thing to “out-source”
    • Sally: There’s lots of resources spent on Launch projects, so it is worth considering this periodically
  • Daniel: Seems like contributing to OSS would fit well with the Portfolio module
    • The goals are different (more about showing off skills) and so better aligned with OSS projects

CYF+

  • Sally: Applications for second round have closed
  • Have had some meetings about improving the CYF+ curriculum
    • All minor things
    • Based on a retro for the previous cohort a bunch of things were identified that trainees need to know but shouldn’t be in the CYF+ curriculum (i.e. should be in the main course)
      • E.g. Tests, building confidence in the CLI
      • This was a driver for including in the main course (have included more tests and Bandit)

❗Actions

  • Sally (Carry-over): Update https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/curriculum/issues/352 to say what needs to be reviewed
  • Daniel (Carry-over): Update reminder message around new meeting format
  • Isar (Carry-over): Triage JS1+JS2 Iteration and Snagging issues - add any needed to the MigraCode milestone
  • Leila + Yun (Carry-over): Describe good code review (possibly via examples of good code review Leila has received).
  • Leila (Carry-over): Find existing code reviewers and understand their experience.
  • Mitch (Carry-over): Get MCB volunteers on-boarded onto Slack
  • Anyone: Write up a ticket to check servers PR after merging
  • Anyone: Write up a ticket for review the Node module in general now that we’ve landed the PRs
  • Zsolt: Figure out what deadlines for landing deployment guide PRs
  • Ali: Add to discussion thread about contributing to OSS projects as part of Portfolio module

2024-01-30

Attendees: Ali Raza Ashraf, Daniel Wagner-Hall, Isar Fridriksson, Sally McGrath

❗Actions from last time

  • Daniel (Carry-over): Update reminder message around new meeting format
  • Isar (Carry-over): Triage JS1+JS2 Iteration and Snagging issues - add any needed to the MigraCode milestone
  • Sally (Carry-over): Provide a repro case for https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/curriculum/issues/222
  • Ali Smith: Review all of Sally’s React and Node workshop migrations
  • [~] Chris: Merge all the Cloud curricula into the curriculum website.
  • Leila + Yun: Describe good code review (possibly via examples of good code review Leila has received).
  • Leila: Find existing code reviewers and understand their experience.
  • Mitch: Get MCB volunteers on-boarded onto Slack
  • Daniel: Get MCB volunteers on-boarded onto GitHub
  • Ali: Set up training club

📝 Agenda points

Cloud port

  • Discussion on https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/curriculum/issues/531#issuecomment-1916880318
    • Generally need to focus on having deliverables trainees can show employers
    • MCB are experimenting with certifications at the moment - we’re not sure how effective that will be, will be interesting to see how it goes!
    • Writing up blog posts could be interesting, as well as helping drive PD, and and helping improve technical writing skills.

Sally will be busy for a bit

But reach out if there are time-critical blockers!

❗Actions

  • Sally: Update https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/curriculum/issues/352 to say what needs to be reviewed
  • Daniel (Carry-over): Update reminder message around new meeting format
  • Isar (Carry-over): Triage JS1+JS2 Iteration and Snagging issues - add any needed to the MigraCode milestone
  • Ali Smith (Carry-over): Review all of Sally’s React and Node workshop migrations
  • Leila + Yun: Describe good code review (possibly via examples of good code review Leila has received).
  • Leila: Find existing code reviewers and understand their experience.
  • Mitch: Get MCB volunteers on-boarded onto Slack

2024-01-16

Attendees: Ali Smith, Chris Owen, Daniel Wagner-Hall, Isar Fridrikkson, Leila Farsani, Mitch Lloyd, Sally McGrath, Yun Ji, Zsolt Sztupak

❗Actions from last time

  • Update reminder message around new meeting format
  • Isar (Carry-over): Triage JS1+JS2 Iteration and Snagging issues - add any needed to the MigraCode milestone
  • Isar (Carry-over): Get all the relevant MigraCode people to fill in this form to join CYF GitHub teams.
  • Sally (Carry-over): Provide a repro case for https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/curriculum/issues/222
  • Ali (Carry-over): Write up a ticket for Sally to document the architecture of the curriculum website
  • Sally: Create a MRE of a monorepo module system and send it out for review.
  • Sally: Get Zsolt a CYF email and on-boarded into our Netlify team plan.
  • Zsolt: Experiment with the CYF Netlify team.
  • [/] Zsolt: Migrate everything in the curriculum to be Netlify + Supabase based. - In progress, draft PR Up
  • [/] Zsolt: Reframe the full-stack assessment to be end-to-end feature slices rather than frontend - backend - DB. - In progress
  • Sally: Cancel the syllabus team meeting on 2024-01-02.

📝 Agenda points

Introductions

  • Isar Fridriksson: MigraCode Barcelona - recently joined the syllabus team.
  • Yun Ji: Studied with MigraCode Barcelona last year. Has PR’d some React fixes to the existing syllabus, taught some modules, and is excited to collaborate more!
  • Chris Owen: Ex Director of Education for CYF. Now working at Sigma Labs (an educator provider). Interested in getting involved with the nascent Cloud module.
  • Leila Farsani: Graduate from London Class 9, volunteering since. Looking for ways to help trainees to thrive more. Has some proposals around improving code review at CYF.
  • Mitch Lloyd: CYF TechEd employee and former volunteer. Has been developing and teaching the curriculum.
  • Sally McGrath: Director of Programme at CYF (and volunteer before).
  • Zsolt Sztupak: Engineering Manager by day, CYF volunteer in Scotland.
  • Daniel Wagner-Hall: Software Engineer, CYF volunteer in London, interested in breaking down problems and giving feedback.

Rebuild of the curriculum platform

  • Sally has created https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/curriculum-labs
  • Split out modules
    • One of common stuff (“common-content”, “common-theme”) - stuff that everyone may want to pull from.
    • CYF and MCB have their own modules which mount these common modules, and may also contain their own unique content (but please contribute to common!)
  • Also already have “sources”, e.g. YouTube, Slides, Runkit, etc.
  • Deployments Just Work.
  • Currently MCB has no modules, but copying them in should be pretty easy.
  • MCB has 3-4 people eager to get contributing.
  • Sally is proposing merging curriculum-labs into curriculum.
  • We’re currently going to keep the MCB site in one repo, but can fork it out if needed (or move the curriculum repo into a shared org).

Code Review

  • Design doc.
  • Primary goal: We’d like to make sure trainees getting more and better feedback on their code.
  • Let’s slim it down to focus on one goal: Getting trainees more code review.
  • Also, we have very variable amounts of code review across the organisation. Some people get good code review already, let’s understand what people’s experiences are.
  • We probably need to make this trainee-driven - get trainees expecting code review, and asking for it.
  • Maybe pull the idea of assessment out of scope - just focus on getting as many useful comments on PRs as possible.
  • Idea that we’re “promoting technical conversation”.
  • Also, reducing class size will help us to be able to scale code review better.

Possible first deliverable:

  • Describing good code review (possibly via examples of good code review Leila has received).
  • Find existing code reviewers and understand their experience.

Next steps:

  • Find some volunteer code reviewers, put them through the “good code reviewer” filter.
  • Set expectations with one cohort (probably NW6)’s trainees that they should expect code review, and get the volunteers to serve that need.

DevOps/Cloud Module

  • What has come before, and who should Chris speak to?
  • Pedro had previously done small-group ad-hoc cloud teaching which was very successful, but doesn’t scale.
  • Pedro, Alvaro, Lorenzo have put together assorted iterations which have had mixed success.
    • Biggest failure was when the module was too hard and trainees weren’t supported enough. The content wasn’t tangible enough - probably needs to be project-driven.
    • Trainees need to have something to be able to show an employer.
    • CYF need something tangible we can demonstrate to potential employers.
  • Existing content: https://main--cyf-cloud-track.netlify.app/cloud/ and https://module-cloud.codeyourfuture.io/overview/welcome-to-devops
  • Sally has agreed Learning Objectives with Alvaro and Lorenzo - Chris will try to collect them.
  • We’re hoping there are a lot of potential Capgemini roles opening up this year - run ideas past Sally to understand how they mesh with CG’s needs.
  • Is there an example of best content? Generally avoid lectures, be very project-focused, JS2 prep is pretty solid.

MigraCode curriculum move

  • Discussion has been ongoing with MCB’s parent organisation - there’s agreement about the changes.
  • Yun Ji is a graduate from ~7 months ago - eager to contribute to open source, great problem solver, and has worn all the hats (student, instructor, etc).
  • More team members being on-boarded (Ali - graduate and head of education - will be joining meetings from February, Isha - graduate/staff)
  • Yun Ji is eager to get started - interested in code review - also found it very valuable in her time on the course!

Training club

❗Actions

  • Daniel (Carry-over): Update reminder message around new meeting format
  • Isar (Carry-over): Triage JS1+JS2 Iteration and Snagging issues - add any needed to the MigraCode milestone
  • Sally (Carry-over): Provide a repro case for https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/curriculum/issues/222
  • Ali: Review all of Sally’s React and Node workshop migrations
  • Chris: Merge all the Cloud curricula into the curriculum website.
  • Leila + Yun: Describe good code review (possibly via examples of good code review Leila has received).
  • Leila: Find existing code reviewers and understand their experience.
  • Mitch: Get MCB volunteers on-boarded onto Slack
  • Daniel: Get MCB volunteers on-boarded onto GitHub
  • Ali: Set up training club

2023-12-19

Attendees: Ali Smith, Daniel Wagner-Hall, Mitchell Lloyd, Sally McGrath, Zsolt Sztupak

Sprint planning

Sprint is basically “review all the things”.

  • Ali will make sure Node gets merged.
  • Daniel will make sure JS3 gets merged.
  • Sally will port React

❗Actions from last time

  • Ali (Carry-over): to put together a proposed ordering of training videos to watch, and arrange a time for discussion.
  • Ali (Carry-over): Review JS1 & 2 content
  • Ali: Update meeting reminder bot to happen on Tuesdays not Thursdays
  • Ali: Find/Make ticket about reworking React
  • Daniel: Read up on Zsolt’s discussion about backend hosting platforms and engage (and also see if he’s interested in reworking the full-stack assessment to be more feature-based)
  • Sally: Share application process details with MigraCode folks
  • Isar: Triage JS1+JS2 Iteration and Snagging issues - add any needed to the MigraCode milestone
  • Isar: Get all the relevant MigraCode people to fill in this form to join CYF GitHub teams.
  • Sally: Provide a repro case for https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/curriculum/issues/222
  • Ali: Write up a ticket for Sally to document the architecture of the curriculum website

📝 Agenda points

Curriculum repo layout

  • Monorepos make it simpler to do things atomically (e.g. for wide-scale change, for unified previews, etc), and to not need to build tooling around stitching things together.
    • Each time we need to build tooling to bridge gaps, either we need to spend time on that tooling, or we need to be sad because we have to live with the limitations of not having that tooling.
  • Our core model is composibility - separating things around can make it easier for people to focus on just their corner of the world.
  • Each place we have an extra repo adds complexity - we should be careful to justify why this it’s worth adding this complexity for each exception we make.
  • Not super clear what value we get from seprate repos over separate directories (which may have their own permissions)?
    • But Hugo’s module system strongly assumes each module has releases of some kind, and we may need to invent some cunning scheme to make this work.
  • Git submodules could potentially help, but also could add complexity.
  • Sally is going to try to build some kind of release system within Hugo and send it out for high-bar review, outside of the curriculum repo so we can experiment and iterate.
  • After prototyping, will need to have branding discussions about exactly where the curriculum lives, if it’s hosting multiple organisations’ curricula.

CYF+

  • Refresher on CYF+:

    • Partnership with Slack - they’re paying the trainees to take the course and on successful completion, a fixed term contract. This will be our second run. First run they hired both trainees in permanent roles – this partnership is not a job guarantee.

  • Slack asked for March, we’re pushing for late April because there’s lots to do.

  • Has been approved by the CTO so we can talk about it happening, but timelines are a little in the air.

  • One graduate will end up in demand engineering, one in data stores, but both will do a data-focused course.

  • Have to put together some data-focused work and projects.

  • Would like to have a pre-work booklet in January so people (particularly trainees) can start looking at it.

  • Important that folks are aware it’s not a London-only programme.

  • Salim is on board to revise the raft project with Laura.

    • Project is very impressive, but also was a bit ambitious - don’t want to break our trainees!

Deployment platforms for our trainees

  • How much should we balance “what we teach” with “how later things will be deployed”?

    • A lot of the higher-level frameworks around React (next, remix, …) abstract away a lot of the things that are useful to understand.
      • Sally has been migrating React Hotel to Vite - could happily put together a few other examples implementations with frameworks (e.g. Preact) we can compare/contrast.
    • As an example, we’ve seen trainees struggle with things like “classic” multi-page applications because it’s not something they’ve ever encoutered.

  • A few really different concerns for our trainees:

    • Can you understand what’s going on with a deployment platform?
    • Can you completely ignore the deployment platform details because we’re actually focusing on something else?
    • Are we giving you a platform you can build more on (e.g. for final projects)
    • Where can we host portfolios that will show off our trainees at their best?

  • Zsolt’s recent research:

    • tl;dr: Netlify + Supabase seems like a winner.
    • Currently we have Netlify/Render for frontend, Render for backend, Render for DB.
    • JS seems to be migrating to more of a serverless backend style - Netlify, AWS Lambda, … support something along these lines
      • Netlify and AWS support “Express as Lambda”
        • Latency appears to be ~200ms per request - free lambdas are only in US
          • We have an unlimited plan, so could maybe move them to EU and maybe host trainee projects - we should experiment, but we can’t on-board the trainees themselves onto the team.
          • We should sign Zsolt up to our netlify team.
      • Could be interesting to migrate from Express to something else, but not going to happen in time for WM5!
    • Full-stack assessment seems to make the most sense on Render because everything fits there.
      • Probably shouldn’t live in people’s portfolios, but some people currently do!
    • ElephantSQL have just removed their free tier for databases.
    • Supabase still offer free databases, and seems pretty good.
      • Has a time limit for inactive projects - need at least one request per week, and they email on inactivity.
      • Supabase have some kind of auth support we may want to investigate.
    • If we settle on supabase, we should probably build our own cron-curler that our trainees can register for.
    • fly.io is really fast and high-quality, but more complicated to set up
      • Spin down/up seems really good, faster than Netlify serverless functions at all!
      • But you only get two “boxes” you can deploy - two backends, or one backend and one database.
    • CloudFlare:
      • Lambda doesn’t have Express wrapper - needs to write some custom Lambda API. DB is SQLite.
    • Experience hiring people with Heroku sites:
      • Everyone knew Heroku put things to sleep and so would maybe cut folks some slack (but maybe that’s just friendly hiring managers).
    • If we could get everything unlimited for free, Render would probably be our choice.
    • We need to think about how we’re going to evolve our curriculum technology-wise.
      • If we end up migrating more towards serverless and are less tied to Postgres specifically, maybe CloudFlare.
        • CloudFlare runs their own JS interpreter which isn’t quite Node - could run into some tricky debugging issues if people end up getting deep into Node.
      • Deno ecosystem support seems a bit early for us to be teaching now, but may be more relevant for us in the future.
        • There is an HTTP server library that works with both Node and Deno
    • Migrating to serverless backends will force us to stop people using global state variables in their backends which they assume persist across requests.
      • We will need to update the curriculum a bit to handle this, as well as the full-stack assessment.
      • Part of this is the same concern as the full-stack assessment being framed as “do a frontend” then “do a backend” then “add a database” rather than end-to-end feature-driven.

❗Actions

  • Update reminder message around new meeting format
  • Isar (Carry-over): Triage JS1+JS2 Iteration and Snagging issues - add any needed to the MigraCode milestone
  • Isar (Carry-over): Get all the relevant MigraCode people to fill in this form to join CYF GitHub teams.
  • Sally (Carry-over): Provide a repro case for https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/curriculum/issues/222
  • Ali (Carry-over): Write up a ticket for Sally to document the architecture of the curriculum website
  • Sally: Create a MRE of a monorepo module system and send it out for review.
  • Sally: Get Zsolt a CYF email and on-boarded into our Netlify team plan.
  • Zsolt: Experiment with the CYF Netlify team.
  • Zsolt: Migrate everything in the curriculum to be Netlify + Supabase based.
  • Zsolt: Reframe the full-stack assessment to be end-to-end feature slices rather than frontend - backend - DB.
  • Sally: Cancel the syllabus team meeting on 2024-01-02.

2023-12-05

Attendees: Ali Smith, Daniel Wagner-Hall, Isar Fridriksson, Sally McGrath

❗Actions from last time

  • Put together a “giving demos” workshop
    • Which maybe involves giving different presentations about the same project with different audiences in mind.
  • Ellie to capture lessons learnt from the London 10 Portfolio module.
  • Daniel to put together a discussion thread about moving/splitting SQL module.
  • Ali to put together a proposed ordering of training videos to watch, and arrange a time for discussion.
  • Ali to file a ticket about not setting innerHTML
  • Ali (Carry-over): Review JS1 & 2 content

📝 Agenda points

Barcelona debrief

  • We met with Isar, Hugo, Simon
  • We attended class for a few hours
    • Felt very CYF-before-flipped-classroom
      • A range of understandings and confidences
    • Ordinarily class has 1-2 teachers and few TAs, but this session we had a load of volunteers so did some interview practice style pairing
    • Did a lot of pairing with people
      • Similarly a range of understandings and confidences
    • They have a regular (well-equipped) space
    • Currently have two classes - one in English, one in Spanish
      • Considering the next cohort only offering English - there are other similar bootcamps offering Spanish but none offer English
  • General agreements to:
    • Identify all the work we need to do for MigraCode’s class in April 2024 to run with the new CYF curriculum
      • Being collected in a GitHub Milestone
      • Need to make a parent theme in Hugo, then two child themes which are siblings
        • Split content into modules, also move around files with Hugo’s internationalisation support (which we will not actually be using in the foreseeable future)
      • We may end up changing some timings things - MigraCode is currently a shorter course, MigraCode currently do two shorter sessions in a week rather than one longer one - not sure how all of these things are going to change, but they’re differences we identified.
      • Audit some content:
        • Mentions of CYF - remove any that aren’t necessary, split any that need re-implementing
        • Remove mentions of “last week”, “next” week, etc - weeks may change
    • Points of uncertainty for MigraCode to resolve internally:
      • Goal alignment - right now CYF’s goals are around employment and MigraCode’s are around graduation - we need to explore how we can align these with MigraCode’s parent organisation and funders.
      • Timings - MigraCode run a shorter course, and more shorter sessions in a week. Need to work out how things will be arranged.
    • Netlify: It would be useful for MigraCode to get their own Netlify, but they’re welcome to share ours until then.
  • Description of CYF Products
  • Need to decide what to do about Fundamentals
    • What would we lose if we removed it?
      • Some amount of cohort building
      • It’s a filter in the application process
      • Trying to instill a culture of shipping things early
  • Blockly doesn’t seem to be directly transferring to JS1/2 - something to muse on

❗Actions

  • Ali (Carry-over): to put together a proposed ordering of training videos to watch, and arrange a time for discussion.
  • Ali (Carry-over): Review JS1 & 2 content
  • Ali: Update meeting reminder bot to happen on Tuesdays not Thursdays
  • Ali: Find/Make ticket about reworking React
  • Daniel: Read up on Zsolt’s discussion about backend hosting platforms and engage (and also see if he’s interested in reworking the full-stack assessment to be more feature-based)
  • Sally: Share application process details with MigraCode folks
  • Isar: Triage JS1+JS2 Iteration and Snagging issues - add any needed to the MigraCode milestone
  • Isar: Get all the relevant MigraCode people to fill in this form to join CYF GitHub teams.
  • Sally: Provide a repro case for https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/curriculum/issues/222
  • Ali: Write up a ticket for Sally to document the architecture of the curriculum website

2023-11-23

Attendees: Ali, Daniel, Ellie Tahmasebi, Isar, Sally

❗Actions from last time

  • Ali: Review Sally’s JS3 PRs on components and JS1 & 2 content
  • Daniel (Carry-over): Try to write up some general ideas for the portfolio track into the curriculum.
  • Mitch & Daniel (Carry-over): to coordinate on visiting WM in person to support
  • Daniel: (Carry-over) Look through the MigraCode curriculum and understand strengths and gaps

📝 Agenda points

Meeting timings

  • HYF Belgium would like to join us - let’s make our meeting earlier so it’s easier for them to.
  • Proposal: Tuesday: 18:30 or 19:00, start with planning then move into discussion.
  • Decision: Tuesdays at 18:30.

Planning

Portfolio module

  • We’d like a curriculum module for the portfolio module.

    • Right now in London 9 things are very ad-hoc.
    • More formal plans would help both graduates and volunteers know what to do.

  • https://curriculum.codeyourfuture.io/portfolio/ already exists - need to flesh out the content.

  • Created https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/curriculum/discussions/386 to capture insights from currently running modules.

  • London 9 Portfolios feels a bit like a final project because of the build-up to a particular demo.

    • Ali would rather frame this as “We want you to portfolio-build” not “We want you to complete this project”.
    • Motivation for this was that many attendees weren’t taking the project very seriously, weren’t committing very much, so this was a way to try to drive motivation.
      • Maybe this isn’t as much of a problem outside of London? But we have post-graduation engagement problems everywhere.
    • Sally would like shorter, pithier demos - right now demos are really long and drawn out.
      • We probably need to give workshops about how to give a good demo.
        • Need to be aware of the goals of different kinds of demos (e.g. “Show off a thing I’ve done” vs “Show something I’ve learnt” vs “Show what’s useful to a user”)
        • Sally shared a pitch camp template.
    • Folder of project ideas

  • What do MigraCode Barcelona do “after” the course?

    • Historically: Not much, and not enough
    • Now have a two-month module
      • Assign each graduate a buddy to have weekly meetings with - work on their linkedin, do practice interviews, etc
      • Also have events for hackathons, job speed dating, etc.

Barcelona trip

  • Do we have an agenda? Do we have goals?
  • Dinner on Friday - Isar will share link
  • Class in English on Saturday 10:30 - 14:30 - JS1W3
    • We’re very welcome to TA!
    • We have a very large office we can use until 17:30
      • Want to draft a plan for how to merge
        • Have energy from volunteers to actually merge
        • Study feasibility of moving to the new curriculum system
        • Work out how to overcome the language barrier - half of MigraCode trainees don’t speak English
        • Enumerate dependencies on outside tools, e.g. integration with student database, homework setting, etc.
  • Sunday - we’ll make a plan.
  • Making sure everyone is in the WhatsApp group - expecting Isar, Carlos, Hugo.
  • Next cohort starts April 2024 - good timing for starting a major change.
    • Biggest change to plan for is how to make sure class time is well facilitated to make flipped classroom really work well.
    • Really want the curriculum to be a shared community curriculum - everyone needs to help evolve it forwards together!

JS3: Should groups be pairs?

  • Yes from the tech-ed side we want pairs
  • Need to check with PD to make sure they don’t have plans that rely on larger groups

Database module timings

  • Daniel proposes moving it to very close to the start of the class
    • Partially it’s a really good framing for problem-solving (e.g. “I need to join before I can select”)
    • Partially because it’s a useful skill for people who leave the course early (much more useful than intro to programming)
    • Partially because SQL has no dependencies on having learnt other things.
  • Sally: Want to have HTML+CSS first because there’s a lot of non-technical faffing that goes on (getting people into planners, getting used to a new operating system, etc).
  • We’d still need a “Node + SQL” integration module (but may be a shorter module).
  • Would need to break into:
    • A SQL module without programming
    • How to do the Node+SQL integration
  • Does it need to be SQL? Could we do this with spreadsheets?
    • We could mix different formats, but should definitely culminate in actual SQL.

Nonprofit ready training courses

  • Ali would like to actually organise this.
  • So he will.

❗Actions

  • Put together a “giving demos” workshop
    • Which maybe involves giving different presentations about the same project with different audiences in mind.
  • Ellie to capture lessons learnt from the London 10 Portfolio module.
  • Daniel to put together a discussion thread about moving/splitting SQL module.
  • Ali to put together a proposed ordering of training videos to watch, and arrange a time for discussion.
  • Ali to file a ticket about not setting innerHTML
  • Ali (Carry-over): Review JS1 & 2 content

2023-11-09

Attendees: Ali, Sally

❗Actions from last time

  • Mitch: Make sure to share out the JS3 rewrite tickets, and get people assigned.
  • Daniel: Try to write up some general ideas for the portfolio track into the curriculum.
  • Mitch & Daniel (Carry-over): to coordinate on visiting WM in person to support
  • Mitch: (Carry-over) record the prep content for WM (deconstructing a JS1 section)
  • Ali: (Carry-over) read the JS3 threads discussion
  • Daniel: (Carry-over) Look through the MigraCode curriculum and understand strengths and gaps

📝 Agenda points

We didn’t have much of an agenda this time, mostly a chat! 🙂

Curriculum rewrite

  • Ali read the JS3 discussion thread & commented - basically in agreement with the plan (to pull the threads of state/rendering earlier into JS3)
  • Mitch has already started on writing up the content
  • Should we go further and reframe the React module to something like a “Frontend Frameworks” module?
    • We think it’s important to have React as a skill for employability
    • But are there more general principles that we could teach?
    • Ali is hesitant that it would turn into SQL vs Mongo situation, which overly focuses on a specific API - going against the idea of general frontend principles
  • Agreed last week to just merge rewrite stuff with the expectation that we can make further PRs to tweak/fix
    • Ali is aiming to work through the JS1 & 2 content to review

Developing a community of practice

  • Came up out of the discussion of a general frontend framework module - how could we communicate the principles of the module to other volunteers?
  • Ali never really thought about it like this, but we can use our experience with teaching trainees to teach the volunteers
  • Ali: maybe a goal for Syllabus Team next year would be to focus on improving this
    • Makes sense for us to finish the curriculum rewrite first
    • A good first start might be to better understand & map out the volunteer onboarding process
  • As usual we think the best approach is to as much as possible go along in person to talk to other volunteers

❗Actions

  • Ali: Review Sally’s JS3 PRs on components and JS1 & 2 content
  • Daniel (Carry-over): Try to write up some general ideas for the portfolio track into the curriculum.
  • Mitch & Daniel (Carry-over): to coordinate on visiting WM in person to support
  • Daniel: (Carry-over) Look through the MigraCode curriculum and understand strengths and gaps

2023-10-26

Attendees: Daniel, Sally

❗Actions from last time

  • Mitch & Daniel to coordinate on visiting WM in person to support
  • Mitch: record the prep content for WM (deconstructing a JS1 section)
  • Everyone: pick up the JS2 tickets linked above (high priority)
  • Ali: read the JS3 threads discussion
  • (Carry-over) Everyone: keep coming up with project ideas
  • (Carry-over) Mitch: Continue with JS2 rewrite
  • (Carry-over) Everyone: Continue reviewing rewrite PRs
  • Daniel: (Carry-over) Look through the MigraCode curriculum and understand strengths and gaps

📝 Agenda points

Curriculum rewrite

  • JS3: Mitch has been writing up tickets for people to pick up for JS3 rewrite.
  • Sally is going to copy over existing content from React and Node. We can still do significant work on it when people have bandwidth.

Portfolios Module

  • Aiming to use as much of the London 10 projects track, and Fundamentals, as possible to do some projects.
  • Trying to introduce some structure and a plan - nothing required or prescriptive, but giving people something to build plans/schedules around.

Parners

  • HYF Belgium would like to participate in syllabus team meetings - Anthony Meirlaen will start joining our meetings.
  • The UK has re-joined Horizon, which means we can EU funding again.
  • We’re re-certified towards the UN Digital Public Good alliance, which means companies can count donations to us towards good things. Issues labelled as SDG4 will be promoted by GitHub for this.

❗Actions

  • Mitch: Make sure to share out the JS3 rewrite tickets, and get people assigned.
  • Daniel: Try to write up some general ideas for the portfolio track into the curriculum.
  • Mitch & Daniel (Carry-over): to coordinate on visiting WM in person to support
  • Mitch: (Carry-over) record the prep content for WM (deconstructing a JS1 section)
  • Ali: (Carry-over) read the JS3 threads discussion
  • Daniel: (Carry-over) Look through the MigraCode curriculum and understand strengths and gaps

2023-10-12

Attendees: Ali, Mitch, Daniel

❗Actions from last time

  • Everyone: keep coming up with project ideas
  • Mitch: Continue with JS2 rewrite
  • Everyone: Continue reviewing rewrite PRs
  • Daniel: (Carry-over) Look through the MigraCode curriculum and understand strengths and gaps

📝 Agenda points

Curriculum update

  • WM5
    • At the moment there’s a lag in the completion of coursework of JS1
      • 87% for week 1, …sorry missed this…% for week 2, 1% for week 3
    • Gap in the knowledge of the volunteers
      • Unsure how they can contribute
      • This is from older & newer volunteers
    • Don’t see evidence of trainees using the time during the week
  • Why Mitch thinks this is happening
    • Curriculum content is challenging
    • Lack of polish because it’s new and we’ve not had time to tidy up
    • Over-assumed skills in reading docs
    • Prep resources
      • Text with exercises
      • Overwhelming for trainees
    • No real sense of energy in the classroom
      • No conversations, not breaking up into small groups
      • Nobody leading this
    • WM transitioned to flipped classroom by themselves
      • No context given through this transition
      • Volunteers struggling to have context
        • Taking away the whiteboard has lead to volunteers not really knowing what to do
        • Ali has seen similar themes in London too
    • Cohort founders would understand the essence of flipped classroom, but this doesn’t seem to be happening
      • Gap in leadership - feel that volunteers are looking to step back a bit
    • Daniel: observed new volunteers turning up without knowing what to do
      • Don’t know a specific person to talk to (e.g. a program manager)
  • Daniel asks about class size, volunteers, etc
    • 1 long standing volunteer, a bunch of new volunteers
    • No official Program Manager for WM
      • Have Matt semi-covering
    • Had a projector screen, and everyone was sat looking at it
    • Class size: 15
  • The good stuff
    • Level of understanding of submitted PRs seems high
      • Hopeful that better organisation will help boost this higher
  • Potential solutions
    • Mitch is organising a classroom orientation
      • Hoping that if we communicate the concepts better, then this will galvanise the cohort
    • Mandatory “training” of cohort founders
      • Learning as a community happens at the beginning but isn’t repeated
        • We could look at putting this in every week
        • Reinforcing the message of collaboration
        • Might need work alongside PD on this
      • Daniel: Tech Ed team might need to be physically present as much as possible to guide the community
    • Mitch: WM could do a volunteer standup while trainees are doing the energiser
    • Presentation of prep work could be worked on
      • Polish
      • Recording sessions
      • Daniel: could we make the prep page a carousel? To make it less intimidating

Who is the course for?

  • Profile of trainees who know no JS at the start of the course
    • Possible that we might be cutting these trainees out?
    • Talked to a WM trainee in this boat - who was finding it very challenging
  • WM did less JS in the pre-work
    • Unknown if covering more JS would have helped with this
  • Daniel: it’s about trajectory not raising the bar
    • Mentioned the mastery model - instead of raising the bar to start the course, ideally we could put multiple bars to clear before moving to the next topic
      • However we don’t have a clear solution to the organisational challenges to this

JS3

  • Created a discussion for the JS3 threads: https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/curriculum/discussions/315
  • Daniel: the threads touch on mapping data to a render
    • Q for Mitch: How far are we leaning into this concept in JS3?
      • W1: Mapping static state to UI
      • W2: Fetching state from server, then map to UI
      • W3: …sorry missed this…
    • Q for Ali: could we steal a week of React to dig into the concept before introducing the React APIs?
      • Historically only the highest skill trainees got the concepts of React based on the TV project - so it wasn’t worth React discussing these concepts in context of React
      • Would be open to discussing this
      • We need to re-work React into 4 weeks anyway, so room for changes
        • There is some tradeoffs to be made since we introduce the React API, but don’t currently spend a lot of “class time” (because it also is pre-flipped classroom) on reinforcing/practicing React - so would like to add some of this if possible
    • Daniel: dream is that the concepts of React (deriving UI from data, state) before they meet the API of React
    • How could this be structured?
      • Daniel: early in React module is focused on refactoring TV project into React-esque API (i.e. some render functions)
      • Conclusion was that we probably can’t fit it all into JS3, so can have the discussion about tradeoffs when we look at updating React
  • Mitch: moving to submarine mode, to finish up JS3
    • Want to finish up the rewrite
    • Want to switch to supporting WM

Town Hall

  • How did it go? Anything changed how it went?
    • Mitch: thought it was really clear, did a good job of communicating the urgency
    • Lots of good follow-up
    • Ali: general worry about tendency to focus on tenders, possibly over portfolio projects
      • It’s easy to focus on tenders because of the payment, but I think it would be worth emphasising that the primary goal is not the money, it’s to put something that looks great on portfolios

Getting JS2 over the line

❗Actions

  • Mitch & Daniel to coordinate on visiting WM in person to support
  • Mitch: record the prep content for WM (deconstructing a JS1 section)
  • Everyone: pick up the JS2 tickets linked above (high priority)
  • Ali: read the JS3 threads discussion
  • (Carry-over) Everyone: keep coming up with project ideas
  • (Carry-over) Mitch: Continue with JS2 rewrite
  • (Carry-over) Everyone: Continue reviewing rewrite PRs
  • Daniel: (Carry-over) Look through the MigraCode curriculum and understand strengths and gaps

2023-09-14

Attendees: Sally, Mitch, Daniel, Ali

❗Actions from last time

  • Everyone: keep coming up with project ideas
  • Mitch: Draft out “project day-plan” (issue)
  • Mitch: Review Sally’s blockData PR asap
  • Daniel: (Carry-over) give feedback to Berkeli on coursework clone button
  • Daniel?: (Carry-over) Look through the MigraCode curriculum and understand strengths and gaps.

📝 Agenda points

Actions from last time

  • Projects
    • What’s the final form? Throw them in the google drive folder
  • Clone issues work from Berkeli
    • Daniel has been reviewing, it’s very close
    • Needs to check that there’s some error handling

JS1 Update

  • Sally & Mitch have got JS1 over the line today! 🎉
    • Prep, workshops, day plans
  • Biggest change: testing now built in from the start
    • Coursework has been updated to reflect that
    • Sally raised some objections - wanted to get some feedback on their PRs
      • Solution: reject if the PR is empty, linting fails, checking for presence of console.assert. If these fail, then set the PR to draft & post a comment to explain
      • Aside: Ali recently learned that Node 20 has a built-in test runner, so we could potentially run tests without installing a library. However it might not be a bad thing to get trainees familiar with industry-standard
  • Previously trainees were skimming through week 1 as there was so much content. Now we’re going deeper thanks to the rewrite, there’s more trainees that will feel the limits of their understanding

WM5

  • Sally: some issues
    • Zero code reviews are being done by mentors on the module repo
    • The work that is being submitted is brilliant, but 1/3 of the class have submitted nothing

Speaking to new cohorts

  • Mitch running Learning as Community workshop for NW6
    • What tone do we want to set?
      • We want to be honest (both about the job market and our/their conduct in the course)
      • Regarding the job market, we don’t want to freak people out, but we want to be honest
    • We are looking 1 year ahead, so the market may change by the time they’re looking
    • Trainees are going to hear discussion of the job market regardless of whether we address it or not
    • We can talk about the ways in which our community can do better in this environment than paid bootcamps
      • We already have no money!
      • We lean on the community to help each other out

Review priorities

  • Lots of things to review - what should we look at first?
    • Daniel will have a reasonable amount of time for reviews
  • Sally: WM5 is doing Week 4 of HTML, so we need to have JS1 completely tied up. The next cohort to start is NW6, doing induction on Sat 16th
  • Sally is initialising the DB module, but wants Keith & co to work on the actual content

Module Project

  • HTML module project
    • Karma clone - get given a website, trainees have to make a “perfect” clone of it
    • Following weeks trainees have to build new features onto this website
    • Daniel’s critique: in fundamentals we have set of Plan / Build / Test / Ship over each week - shouldn’t we deploy in week 1?
      • Sally: we should be doing a version of Plan / Build / Test / Ship every week
      • Daniel really likes the “Levels” context: you have to complete e.g. Level 100 tasks (and deploy) before moving to Level 200
  • Our project doesn’t quite work for it

Helping prepare for Town Hall

  • Town hall to discuss the state of employment/CYF likely scheduled for next week sometime
  • Is there anything we can do to help prepare
    • Staff preparing slides
    • Talk to volunteers to prepare them for shift in focus, get buy-in

❗Actions

  • Everyone: keep coming up with project ideas
  • Mitch: Continue with JS2 rewrite
  • Everyone: Continue reviewing rewrite PRs
  • Daniel: (Carry-over) Look through the MigraCode curriculum and understand strengths and gaps

2023-08-31

Attendees: Sally, Ali, Daniel, Mitch

❗Actions from last time

  • Sally: Ask Berkeli to merge v1 (when he gets back from holiday)
  • Ali: give feedback to Berkeli on coursework clone button
  • Ali: open a ticket to handle images in “remote” repos configured with relative links
  • Ali: open a ticket to discuss branching strategies across the course
  • Ali: open a ticket to reframe the full stack assessment around completing end-to-end features
  • Mitch & Issar (Carry-over): Discuss flipped classroom resources and prep material (issue)
  • Mitch & Issar (Carry-over): Discuss training resources for Migracode volunteers (issue)
  • Daniel (Carry-over): Review Git content & Rewrite JS1 Week 4
  • Mitch (Carry-over): Complete rewrite for Git Week 1 content
  • Mitch (Carry-over): Merge feedback for JS1 rewrites (Issue)
  • Mitch (Carry-over): Add coming soon label for upcoming curriculum modules… (Issue)
  • Mitch (Carry-over): Start low-fi drafts for JS2 Weeks 5,6
  • Daniel (Carry-over): Look through the MigraCode curriculum and understand strengths and gaps.
  • Sally (Carry-over): Follow up on Karo + Ali’s syncing up.
  • Mitch (Carry-over): Get more video content made shared with MigraCode from CYF. (Issue)

📝 Agenda points

Re-write progress

JS1 Week 1 merged JS1 Week 2 merged JS1 Week 3 awaiting merge JS1 Week 4 awaiting review & copy edits JS2 Week 1 awaiting review & copy edits JS2 Week 2 in draft - being prepped for review JS2 Week 3 in draft - being prepped for review JS2 Week 4 - going to be a mini-project week (no prep content)

Mitch to spend time in next sprint on:

  • finishing final weeks of prep content for JS2
  • finishing new exercises and challenges for JS1
  • finishing workshops for JS1 module

Please keep on providing marvellous feedback

Discussion around adding consolidation weeks

Sally:

  • Currently a big diff in process across regions
  • WM have consolidation weeks
  • NW had a consolidation week once
  • Need to let regions know they’re empowered to do it
  • WM has least flexibility for running consolidation weeks

Ali:

  • Trade off between consolidation and momentum
  • Need to make this trade-off clear to the tech-ed volunteers
  • Need to avoid heroic efforts and adding unncessary extra time to the course

Mitch:

  • Keep communicating: you won’t understand everything all the time

Re LDN10:

  • Some people who still haven’t understood the stuff
  • Arrange some sessions with these people
  • Need training around pairing with people and checking their work

Re assessments:

  • No-one using the one-2-one assessments that Chris made
  • Codility fine for automated assessments
  • Introduce consequences for results?
  • Set aside time to pair with the trainees in buddy groups
  • Learning as a community - Mitch and Ali to pick up this discussion. Where do we want to go?

Employment woes

Context:

  • Junior dev market has cratered!
  • Code schools are going bust!
  • E.g. Outcomes have gone from 90% to 10% in NW - huge drop-off
  • NW graduated in March and have had very little success in finding jobs
  • Hiring freezes may last for another six months
  • A lot of tech-ed people just beginning to grasp the reality of the situation
  • Messaging to come out in the next few days re employment strategy in current environment

Re Navigating the employment situation:

  • Sit down in small groups and build projects!
  • Keep grads together and running Saturday classes for grads so they end up in better shape
  • Hiring grads to work on projects
  • Sally has started a list of small-scale specced projects
  • Keep speccing projects!
  • day-plan for project day - Mitch to come up with tentative design in next sprint
  • People will need project ideas otherwise they’ll do nothing

Other strategies:

  • Hacktoberfest could be done as a guild
  • Motivating people: some kind of event for getting people to do something

Re pause on ITD:

  • ITD won’t be launched until 50% of the grads are in jobs

  • 800 people waiting for ITD in LDN

  • Send useful things for waiting ITD candidates before coming on the course
  • Completion rate is 1 in 10 for LDN10 - need to be honest with people about their chances of getting on the course

❗Actions

  • Everyone: keep coming up with project ideas
  • Mitch: Draft out “project day-plan” (issue)
  • Mitch: Review Sally’s blockData PR asap
  • Ali?: (Carry-over) give feedback to Berkeli on coursework clone button
  • Daniel?: (Carry-over) Look through the MigraCode curriculum and understand strengths and gaps.

2023-08-17

Attendees: Ali, Sally, Greg, Mitch

❗Actions from last time

  • Sally: Ask Berkeli to merge v1 (when he gets back from holiday)

  • Ali: give feedback to Berkeli on coursework clone button

  • Ali: open a ticket to handle images in “remote” repos configured with relative links

  • Ali: open a ticket to discuss branching strategies across the course

  • Ali: open a ticket to reframe the full stack assessment around completing end-to-end features

  • Mitch (Carry-over): Complete rewrite for Git Week 1 content

  • Mitch (Carry-over): Merge feedback for JS1 rewrites

  • Mitch (Carry-over): Add coming soon label for upcoming curriculum modules…

  • Mitch (Carry-over): Start low-fi drafts for JS2 Weeks 5,6

  • Sally (Carry-over): Follow up on Karo + Ali’s syncing up.

  • Mitch (Carry-over): Get more video content made shared with MigraCode from CYF.

📝 Agenda points

Curriculum rewrite update

Mitch:

  • Lots of rigorous, useful feedback. Thanks!
  • JS1 week 1 is done
  • JS1 week 2 soon to come
  • Soon have about half the prep released/ready for review
    • Support with someone else for video
  • Matching exercise rewrites where necessary

WM doing html/css week 1

Lots of incredibly positive aspects:

  • Correctly formed PRs
  • Formatted code
  • Visibly high quality work
  • Reviewing each others’ PRs

Building COP around flipped classroom

  • Would be good if Ali could observe one of Mitch’s intro sessions so he’s able to deliver in LDN

❗Actions

  • Ali (carry over): give feedback to Berkeli on coursework clone button
  • Mitch & Issar (Carry-over): Discuss flipped classroom resources and prep material
  • Mitch & Issar (Carry-over): Discuss training resources for Migracode volunteers
  • Daniel (Carry-over): Review Git content & Rewrite JS1 Week 4
  • Daniel (Carry-over): Look through the MigraCode curriculum and understand strengths and gaps.
  • Mitch (Carry-over): Get more video content made shared with MigraCode from CYF.

2023-08-03

Attendees: Ali, Sally, Carlos

❗Actions from last time

  • Mitch & Issar: Discuss flipped classroom resources and prep material
  • Mitch & Issar: Discuss training resources for Migracode volunteers
  • Ali: Look into possibility of banner on old syllabus content during trial of new curriculum content
    • Decided to skip this - the only classes still using the old syllabus are near completion, so will probably be simpler to just wait it out (and then set up a redirect)
  • Ali: Review Git Content?
  • Daniel: Review Git content & Rewrite JS1 Week 4
  • Mitch: Complete rewrite for Git Week 1 content
  • Mitch: Merge feedback for JS1 rewrites
  • Mitch: Add coming soon label for upcoming curriculum modules…
  • Mitch: Start low-fi drafts for JS2 Weeks 5,6
  • Daniel (Carry-over): Look through the MigraCode curriculum and understand strengths and gaps.
  • Carlos (Carry-over): Look through the existing CYF curriculum and understand strengths and gaps.
    • Carlos wants to focus on the new curriculum content as it’s now more relevant, so will drop this
  • (Carry-over) Follow up on Karo + Ali’s syncing up.
    • Sally to follow up on this later, possible holidays etc are interfering :)
  • Mitch (Carry-over): Get more video content made shared with MigraCode from CYF.

📝 Agenda points

Publishing deadlines for new curriculum

  • NW are starting soon
  • Sally has set dates for publication dates
  • General policy: if you don’t have time to review before the deadlines, then merge and folks can open changes as a follow up PR

Learning as a community

  • Recap for Carlos
  • Teachers & trainees will have a workshop together
    • “How do you learn at CYF” philosophy
  • Goals
    • Avoid divisions between trainees & teachers
    • Empower advanced trainees to be teachers, setting them up for success - learn how to be teachers
    • Reframing teaching in the community
      • Example: trainees “giving away answers” to other trainees - hopefully nip this in the bud at the start
  • How do we handle volunteers who join part way through the course?
    • Sally: experienced trainees could run a refresher course?

Coursework copy button

  • PR now open
  • Action: ask Berkeli to merge v1 (when he gets back from holiday)
  • Ali still needs to give some feedback (mostly to cut down on the ops complexity), but thinks that it’s best to ship what we have and fix later

Git branching

  • How do we handle branches for multiple weeks
    • We cover how to branch week-1 but what should they do for week-2 branch?
  • We can teach multiple branching strategies, but what do we teach first?
  • This coursework issue in HTML/CSS tells them to create a new branch for each project - so introducing multiple branches early on
    • Sally: please make sure that the instructions are clear in these tickets
  • We need to think about what branching strategies are taught and when they are introduced
  • Action: open a ticket to discuss branching strategies across the course

Full stack assessment

  • Sally: worried that it isn’t suitable and is actively sabotaging the final projects
  • The general structure of the existing work: build the whole frontend first, then the whole backend
  • This causes some issues:
    • Trainees build a lot of “useless” stuff like headers/footers, and not focusing on the main functionality
    • There’s no thinking about the users/Product aspect - i.e. trainees aren’t thinking about the problem are we attempting to solve
    • Not prioritising completing a feature and instead building out half of many features
  • Suggested solution: reframe the exercise to “slice” it so that trainees focus on completing end-to-end features, instead of frontend/backend. Hopefully this shouldn’t be too difficult, as the underlying content should be ok
  • We should fix this before the next cohort gets to it
  • Action: open a ticket to reframe the assessment around completing end-to-end features

Pathways

  • Something that LDN10 are doing
    • See slides
    • Summary: 5 additional weeks at the end of the course, trainees get to choose which from 5 possible modules (cloud, devops, QA, Product, Data)
  • The LDN10 pathways project is after the full course has finished, but historically we have had variations on the latter half of the course (i.e. something instead of React/Node/Databases)
    • In London, usually after the React module. But we think it should be after JS3
    • If we follow the historical route, how do we integrate other courses/modules into the main course?
  • How far do we want to go towards letting cohorts decide how to run this part of the course?
    • Probably quite a lot: we don’t have a lot of “control” over it!
    • But we do think that we should have an opinion on how to approach it
  • Should trainees have a choice in what path they choose?
    • If so, how do we structure the course so that they can make a successful choice (that they would enjoy)
    • And how do we prevent e.g. sexism influencing choices?
  • These are big questions and we didn’t really have any answers for them at the moment
    • So probable next steps are for us to start thinking about this
    • We should also try to gather data on what is working / what isn’t working and needs to be employability driven
  • Should we invite volunteers working on alternative curriculums to join the team so we can discuss?

Sprint planning

  • Not all of the tickets were on the planning board, but should be now
  • Lots of PRs were in the Backlog column - please could you move them to the appropriate place?

❗Actions

  • Sally: Ask Berkeli to merge v1 (when he gets back from holiday)
  • Ali: give feedback to Berkeli on coursework clone button
  • Ali: open a ticket to handle images in “remote” repos configured with relative links
  • Ali: open a ticket to discuss branching strategies across the course
  • Ali: open a ticket to reframe the full stack assessment around completing end-to-end features
  • Mitch & Issar (Carry-over): Discuss flipped classroom resources and prep material
  • Mitch & Issar (Carry-over): Discuss training resources for Migracode volunteers
  • Daniel (Carry-over): Review Git content & Rewrite JS1 Week 4
  • Mitch (Carry-over): Complete rewrite for Git Week 1 content
  • Mitch (Carry-over): Merge feedback for JS1 rewrites
  • Mitch (Carry-over): Add coming soon label for upcoming curriculum modules…
  • Mitch (Carry-over): Start low-fi drafts for JS2 Weeks 5,6
  • Daniel (Carry-over): Look through the MigraCode curriculum and understand strengths and gaps.
  • Sally (Carry-over): Follow up on Karo + Ali’s syncing up.
  • Mitch (Carry-over): Get more video content made shared with MigraCode from CYF.

20-07-2023

Attendees: Ali, Daniel, Issar, Mitch

❗Actions from last time

  • Mitch: Put together a proposal for JS2 threads.

📝 Agenda points

SDC launch day & Git workshop day 1

  • Mitch is currently rewriting some of the content for Git week 1: committing, forking, branching, pull requests. All the changed components are collected here Rewrite for Git day 1

Learning as a community workshop

  • Mitch is working on a workshop for the launch of SDC around Learning as a community. The focus of the workshop will be as follows:
    • educational philosophy at CYF
    • independent learning, problem-solving with the community
    • how the curriculum is structured and why it is structured the way it is
    • how do we use the time in classes to overcome blockers and difficulties
  • the workshop will propose questions, discussions and activities to help people focus on these points. It won’t be a lecture.
  • This workshop won’t be teacher training: it will involve the whole community of volunteers and trainees
  • Encouraging folks to talk through about their insights to help the community make the most out of time on Saturdays

Some other observations…

  • Daniel thought 1/2 class in LDN10 weren’t comfortable with React

  • Need to consider the possibility of adding an extra week to deal with lack of understanding in a group

  • There’s a real need to empower people to make changes to focus on a particular area

  • Opposite end: need to press forward with the curriculum content, tension between delaying to address misconceptions and continuing the course to cover content

  • Also need for course momentum + working out boundaries

  • Some trainees are waiting for Saturday to get unblocked/ask questions

  • London trainees were asked to raise their hand and indicate if they’d done prep: a significant amount admitted they hadn’t

  • Trainees should at least be doing enough work to _ Consider setting up groups during the week to identify key blockers and doing a standup on Saturday

Feedback loop problem

  • We expect trainees to tell us problems
  • We expect volunteers to react to problems
  • We could introduce formative assessments as a means of collecting data about trainees’ weaknesses/strengths

❗Actions

  • Mitch & Issar: Discuss flipped classroom resources and prep material
  • Mitch & Issar: Discuss training resources for Migracode volunteers
  • Ali: Look into possibility of banner on old syllabus content during trial of new curriculum content
  • Ali: Review Git Content?
  • Daniel: Review Git content & Rewrite JS1 Week 4
  • Mitch: Complete rewrite for Git Week 1 content
  • Mitch: Merge feedback for JS1 rewrites
  • Mitch: Add coming soon label for upcoming curriculum modules…
  • Mitch: Start low-fi drafts for JS2 Weeks 5,6
  • Daniel (Carry-over): Look through the MigraCode curriculum and understand strengths and gaps.
  • Carlos (Carry-over): Look through the existing CYF curriculum and understand strengths and gaps.
  • (Carry-over) Follow up on Karo + Ali’s syncing up.
  • Mitch: Get more video content made shared with MigraCode from CYF. We should probably not leave them un-listed, and should just public them up (maybe with comments disabled).
  • All: Review Mitch’s JS1 rewrite PRs Progress definitely being made, people are very happy, will continue. Maybe need to check about releases for presenters.
  • Mitch (Carry-over): Follow up with Isar about teacher training resources for flipped classroom for Barcelona.
  • (Carry-over) Greg: Start migrating flipped classroom content for JS1 to the new curriculum.
  • (Carry-over) Greg: Write a ticket for “work out how should we get feedback on classes/modules”
  • (Carry-over) Daniel: Work out how to make clear to people how to edit/improve the content of the new curriculum.

2023-07-06

Attendees: Ali Smith, Daniel Wagner-Hall, Sally McGrath

❗Actions from last time

Mostly lots of carry-over to next time.

  • All: Review Mitch’s JS1 rewrite PRs Progress definitely being made, people are very happy, will continue.
  • Mitch: Get more video content made shared with MigraCode from CYF. We should probably not leave them un-listed, and should just public them up (maybe with comments disabled). Maybe need to check about releases for presenters.
  • Mitch: Follow up with Isar about teacher training resources for flipped classroom for Barcelona.
  • (Carry-over) Greg: Start migrating flipped classroom content for JS1 to the new curriculum.
  • (Carry-over) Greg: Write a ticket for “work out how should we get feedback on classes/modules”
  • (Carry-over) Daniel: Work out how to make clear to people how to edit/improve the content of the new curriculum.
  • Mitch: Write up “How we put together the curriculum” narrative.
  • (Carry-over) Follow up on Karo + Ali’s syncing up.
  • Mitch: Put together proposal for JS2 threads.
  • Carlos: Look through the existing CYF curriculum and understand strengths and gaps.
  • Daniel: Look through the MigraCode curriculum and understand strengths and gaps.

📝 Agenda points

HTML/CSS Module

Sally has been taking a look and generally revising it a bit, with a bit more devtools and forms.

When we’re done with JS rewrites, we should step back and consider how we want to spend the first 4-5 weeks of the course.

Curriculum rewrite

JS2 Threads - generally looks great! We left a few comments on the discussion.

Open question: How will we find out what problems there are in our new curriculum, and how will we make sure we react to those issues to make improvements.

Our best answer so far: Try to be on the ground watching as much as possible.

Git

We need to work out how to introduce Git, but hopefully for the current class can spend some time across HTML/CSS doing so in the background.

Consistent feedback we get from employeers:

  • Graduates are too eager to fork repos.
  • Graduates are confused about forks vs branches.
  • Graduates always add all of their files and don’t pay much attention to content they shouldn’t be committing.

Ideally we would be selling git as a safety net which reduces fear.

We value about the current module that we introduce different concepts gradually, e.g. we don’t cover merge conflicts early.

Ali would like to remove forking early on as it would reduce the complexity of the coursework workflow.

Daniel would like to have the git teaching independently of code - have our trainees learn by writing stories or something, so we can divorce “learning git stuff” from the fear of breaking/losing their code.

❗Actions

  • Sally: Chase Karo about meeting with Ali
  • All: Review Mitch’s JS1 rewrite PRs Progress definitely being made, people are very happy, will continue.
  • Mitch: Get more video content made shared with MigraCode from CYF. We should probably not leave them un-listed, and should just public them up (maybe with comments disabled). Maybe need to check about releases for presenters.
  • Mitch: Follow up with Isar about teacher training resources for flipped classroom for Barcelona.
  • Greg: Start migrating flipped classroom content for JS1 to the new curriculum.
  • Greg: Write a ticket for “work out how should we get feedback on classes/modules”
  • Daniel: Work out how to make clear to people how to edit/improve the content of the new curriculum.
  • Mitch: Write up “How we put together the curriculum” narrative.
  • Mitch: Put together proposal for JS2 threads.
  • Carlos: Look through the existing CYF curriculum and understand strengths and gaps.
  • Daniel: Look through the MigraCode curriculum and understand strengths and gaps.

2023-06-22

Attendees: Carlos Perez, Daniel Wagner-Hall, Greg Dyke, Isar Fridriksson, Mitchell Lloyd

❗Actions from last time

  • Everyone, but particularly Daniel: Review Fundamentals on https://cyf-curriculum.netlify.app/ (sourced from https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/curriculum) and fix/report anything that would mean it’s not ready for June 24th.
  • Ali: Make a ticket for full-text search on the new curriculum.
  • Ali: Make a ticket to change the random emoji menu button to just a hamburger menu icon
  • Sally: Respond to code review on CYF blocks toggle
  • Carlos + Daniel, Isar + Greg, Karo + Ali: Pair up and work on something together, come back next meeting with reports. Maybe in particular, try to work out fit / gaps for adoption.

📝 Agenda points

Follow up from MigraCode / CYF meetings in-week

Isar & Greg: Optimistic about opportunities to collaborate on one syllabus. Also considering switching to flipped classroom for the same reasons we are. Follow-ups around making more video content from CYF public, and working out what training resources would be useful for flipped classroom.

Carlos & Daniel: Shared lots of background together. Both planning to read through each other’s syllabuses to see what would be useful to pull in from the MigraCode syllabus, and what may be missing from the CYF syllabus. Excited about trying to share and work together on one syllabus - particularly collaborating on Mitch’s rewrites.

JS1 & 2 rewrites

Introduction to our approach: Learning themes, mental models; threading themes across weeks.

PRs for JS1 have been drafted: https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/curriculum/pulls - ready for review tomorrow.

(Spent our time in discussion in a miro board planning JS2).

Action items

  • All: Review Mitch’s JS1 rewrite PRs
  • Mitch: Get more video content made shared with MigraCode from CYF.
  • Mitch: Follow up with Isar about teacher training resources for flipped classroom for Barcelona.
  • (Carry-over) Greg: Start migrating flipped classroom content for JS1 to the new curriculum.
  • (Carry-over) Greg: Write a ticket for “work out how should we get feedback on classes/modules”
  • (Carry-over) Daniel: Work out how to make clear to people how to edit/improve the content of the new curriculum.
  • Mitch: Write up “How we put together the curriculum” narrative.
  • (Carry-over) Follow up on Karo + Ali’s syncing up.
  • Mitch: Put together proposal for JS2 threads.
  • Carlos: Look through the existing CYF curriculum and understand strengths and gaps.
  • Daniel: Look through the MigraCode curriculum and understand strengths and gaps.

2023-06-08

Attendees: Ali Smith, Carlos Perez, Daniel Wagner-Hall, Greg Dyke, Isar Fridriksson, Karolina Urn, Sally McGrath

❗Actions from last time

  • Mitch: Synthesise our assorted ideas for week themes into a proposal to discuss.
  • Ali: Work with Berkeli to get the “clone issues” App shipped (spec and WIP PR).
    • They had a chat, Berkeli is planning to do more work, but may need a little chasing.

📝 Agenda points

Introductions

  • Ali Smith
    • London-based
    • Long-time CYF volunteer and syllabus creator, put together a lot of the React course
    • Working at Overleaf in Engineering Management
  • Daniel Wagner-Hall
    • CYF volunteer for a few years, worked through most roles
    • Particularly motivated to try to get our trainees focusing less on code and more on problem solving
  • Carlos Perez
    • Software Engineer at New Relic (mostly backend, a bit of frontend)
    • Volunteer at MigraCode since ~2 years ago, mostly teaching the last 1 year
    • Teaching the javascript modules, excited to learn React soon to be able to teach it
  • Isar Fridriksson
    • Volunteer at MigraCode Barcelona for about 10 months
    • Syllabus is a fork of an old CodeYourFuture syllabus - think we should probably work together more
    • Mostly do management of volunteers, trainees, etc
    • Background is full-stack development, quite obsessed with automation, CI/CD
    • Studying at 42 School
  • Karolina Urn
    • From HackYourFuture Denmark
    • Was student, then mentor, then professional FE developer and product manager, now a HYF staff member in education management
    • Mostly busy being hands-on, haven’t had time to worry about the syllabus too much
    • Curriculum is quite out-dated - took over from Amsterdam a couple of years ago, works fine but could be better
  • Greg Dyke
    • In Edinburgh, does a lot of work with CYF Glasgow - has done most things at CYF
    • Works at Avaloq on compilers, and looking for interesting ways to tie that into CYF
    • Currently trying to let the Glasgow volunteers work out how they’re managing their cohort, and focusing more on syllabus development
    • Focus is around how to get trainees writing tests more and well, and also responsible for CYF Blocks - block-based programming to focus on problem solving before knowing JS-syntax

CodeMirror 6 in Curriculum

We’re hoping to move to the new curriculum ideally June 24th.

Ali has been working on a component that uses CodeMirror to allow making all code blocks editable (and maybe executable). Makes it easier in-class to try out edits to things, show examples.

Have talked about making code executable - could be something to do next. Probably by shoving the code into an iframe. JS-Interpreter could be useful at some point too.

We can also add an option to highlight specific lines.

Karolina: What’s the goal, to serve exercises from the curriculum, or…?

Yes, mostly “sample problems” rather than homework, and examples we’ve prepared for our teachers/volunteers.

As an example, this page has some “introduction to objects” code examples, and some “fill in some code with examples” exercises - being able to live-edit them would be super useful.

Also, a note: We’re switching to flipped classroom model, where we assign the reading/learning for trainees to do at home, and then spend our classes with them actually helping them with their problems.

Sally demo’d the new curriculum website
  • Remixable sources of data e.g. markdown, videos, etc.
  • Coursework exists as issues on GitHub, which also gets pulled in
  • Big problem this solves is that people aren’t entirely sure what they should be doing and what to do next - new curriculum is strongly guided around “What do I do next?”

Isar: Would this allow for submitting work for review/correction? Currently no, but hopefully in the future.

Karolina: At HYF each module is currently a separate repo, and no one ever submits PRs to them because they’re hard to find and there’s a high barrier to entry.

We’re moving to have one repo per module with all of the exercises, and using that as one of the input sources for rendering a module.

At the end of each week, we have a checklist of each learning objective, which can be checked off. We currently have trainees who both

For forking our material - can have your own curriculum website using this system which pulls in material a mix of direct from CYF or from a fork or from other sources, and which makes transitioning to shared modules, or trying out new drafts of modules, really easy.

Are there any features we really want to keep from docusaurus?
  • Admonitions - already implemented.
  • Where will our minutes live?
  • Search? Sally can build it if we need, but not sure how used/useful it is.
  • Where do workshops and guides go? Guides exist at https://cyf-curriculum.netlify.app/guides/

Greg Wilson wants to make an intro a researcher

  • Cat Hicks - research at Pluralsight Flow researching what makes developers effective
  • Interested in learning more about CYF

June 24th for new curriculum

West Midlands are starting Fundamentals on June 24th. Would be ideal if they can start with the new curriculum and never know anything different. What blockers do we have?

ChatGPT

There’s a lot of energy behind ChatGPT right now, we should get some enthusiastic community folks to put together a plan for how to embrace it in our course.

James Bromley has been giving some workshops in London.

One of Karolina’s mentors has an interesting workshop for testing/code review via ChatGPT - happy to share.

Isar: MigraCode Barcelona have been working on a code-writing workshop - happy to share too.

London 10 & Glasgow 6

Have been trying to get the classes to work together, but not sure people are engaging across the classes.

Any engagement people are doing is probably in DMs. Sigh.

How are people feeling about sharing content?

Isar: Generally good, working together makes sense.

Carlos: Want to understand why the fork happened originally, and why edits were made since, but in principle makes sense.

Ali: We have prior experience of someone (CYF Colombia) trying to take our content, and it not working very well. Think a problem was that they assumed the curriculum was perfect and just needed translating, which was far from the case.

How would we transition plan and work out the logistics to work together?

Also, everyone should bear in mind none of the current curriculum content is “done” or “perfect” - please look at it with a “we can change anything” mindset!

Sprint planning

We declared backlog bankruptcy. Here’s our new board.

❗Actions

  • Everyone, but particularly Daniel: Review Fundamentals on https://cyf-curriculum.netlify.app/ (sourced from https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/curriculum) and fix/report anything that would mean it’s not ready for June 24th.
  • Greg: Start migrating flipped classroom content for JS1 to the new curriculum.
  • Greg: Write a ticket for “work out how should we get feedback on classes/modules”
  • ??: Work out how to make clear to people how to edit/improve the content of the new curriculum.
  • Ali: Make a ticket for full-text search on the new curriculum.
  • Ali: Make a ticket to change the random emoji menu button to just a hamburger menu icon
  • Sally: Respond to code review on CYF blocks toggle
  • Carlos + Daniel, Isar + Greg, Karo + Ali: Pair up and work on something together, come back next meeting with reports. Maybe in particular, try to work out fit / gaps for adoption.

{DATE HERE}

Attendees:

❗Actions from last time

📝 Agenda points

❗Actions

2023-05-11

Attendees: Ali, Sally, Greg, Mitch, Daniel, Keith, Thomas

❗Actions from last time

  • Mitch: Synthesise our assorted ideas for week themes into a proposal to discuss.
  • Daniel: Work with Berkeli to get the “clone issues” App shipped (spec and WIP PR).
    • Handed over to Ali - who didn’t manage to do it yet

📝 Agenda points

New Syllabus

  • New syllabus
  • Demo-ed
  • Big bit of feedback from everyone: people want to know what to do and when
  • Modules all have the same structure
    • Prep, 4(?) sprints, Backlog, Success, Product
  • Block composition
    • Each page is a Markdown “config” file, with pointers to blocks
    • Blocks can be our content (another Markdown file), Youtube, links to other pages (marked with 🔗), …other stuff
    • Concept: 1 source of truth, and we just configure the pointers
    • Backlog view
      • Coming from the module repo - the coursework tickets
      • Day plan - roughly what will happen during the day of the lesson
        • Computing timings for each block - this is configured from the block itself
    • Product view
      • A project for the whole module
      • Put separately - slightly unclear where this should live
      • 4 stages: Plan, build, …, ship
    • Creating a module
      • Bash script to scaffold out the necessary files
  • Being developed as a branch on the main syllabus repo
    • So can just pull it to play with it
      • Possibly depends on having Go installed
    • Sally will get it deployed on Netlify
  • Where is help needed?
    • Code blocks
      • Have some code to render these blocks
      • Interested in setting up CodeMirror to render these - Ali can take a look at this
      • Goal: edit code and run it
        • Also run this in on mobile
        • Ali: just to clarify CM is really just a way of editing code in a IDE-like way, it doesn’t do anything around storing/syncing/running code
  • Daniel: How is coursework going to work mechanically?
    • Coursework issues are replacing google classroom
    • There’ll be a button where they can clone issues from the template onto their repo
      • They can then manage their tickets on e.g. a kanban
    • All the code for a module will live in a “module repo” - which contains the issues and the code
    • This is being tested with LDN 10 & GLA X(?) - it’s a bit rocky without the built in button to clone issues
  • Sally: Talked to PD about what they wanted for their integrations
    • They don’t like PRs/Github
    • So have built them a mini-CMS/platform for creating content
    • Can create their blocks directly on their platform
      • We can then just point at the platform via a block pointer
  • Goal: make it easier to write content & experiment
    • Greg: can we make changes to a module but not have them go live until we update the config
    • Sally: can also write e.g. a workshop session, they can write
    • Wanting experiments with syllabus but with a single source of truth

Hello to Thomas 👋🏻

  • Teach at QM Uni
  • Approached Daniel, who pointed in our direction
  • Interested in creating a Python/Data science course

Curriculum rewrite

  • Mitch: Action from the previous meeting: synthesise feedback from the previous meeting
    • One of the main bits of feedback was around not trying to fit 1 learning theme into 1 module. They have to be threaded throughout, so we need to weave them together
  • Proposal on the Miro board
  • First question: are people broadly happy with the overall direction
    • No objections
  • Second question: Mitch has to be in deep focus to work on this, so cutting out Slack - but should this be more collaborative?
    • How do you see this being reviewed?
      • Depends on what we want
      • Proposal: sketch out like have done so far until the end of May, then report back
    • General agreement that we’d be happy to for Mitch to work on it, then we copy-edit it
    • High intensity for Mitch: is there a way of doing this in a lower fidelity way
      • E.g. “problem " wit hReact module - it’s so cohesive that to iterate on it would be to un-weave and rework from there - will we end up with something like this with thus module
        • Another way of framing this - if produced at high fidelity, but we have to go back to rework the weaving, then we’ve wasted the work on the high fidelity
      • But on the other hand, the high fidelity output has been useful
    • Can we “user test” the content?
      • It’s tricky to user test a single JS module - since it’s a large-ish change we can’t test it with a class

PD/Tech Ed Syllabus Teams meet up

  • It’s happening in 2 weeks
    • Not everyone realised it was going to be in-person
    • Ali & Sally (at least) will be around
  • Lara from PD is organising - we should talk to her to sort out a plan
  • Sally: PD PRs - are they ok?
    • Daniel: generally seem reasonable
      • Some points about the details of the content
      • The formatting/structure is generally good
  • Sally: PD have a lot of technical problems with building stuff
    • E.g. just wanted a website - took Sally 3 hours to build this
    • Are there any other problems we can solve for them?

Python/ML module

  • We don’t currently cover any of this in the curriculum
  • Is there demand for this?
    • Sally: We’re focused on getting trainees good jobs - There’s aspects of ML that will help them get a job, but some aspects that won’t help
      • Many more advanced ML-like roles require degrees etc
      • There are more entry-level data engineering roles, so we would probably want to target this and / or identify roles where entry-level grads could get a job
      • The competition for entry-level jobs is really fierce, so we need to identify the best usage of our time
    • Daniel: if you have a 1 day workshop prepared, then this is a no-brainer, especially for grads
    • Daniel: not having seen multiple programming languages might be an issue for grads
      • So having some Python content to show the similarities could boost confidence and employability
    • Thomas: think that a bit of base-level knowledge is helpful for employability
  • How could Thomas help create something?
    • Day job is designing modules, so can do various things in this area
    • Thomas: Happy to contribute towards ideas around developing Python content
      • Want to get to know the org a bit more first
      • Realise that it takes quite a long time to develop new courses - it takes 2 years at the university
    • Greg: we’ve observed that trainees struggle with going out on their own and solving big problems - could we do something unguided that they could work on in their own time?
      • Thomas: this sounds like something he was thinking of, so agree that this could work
  • Greg: generally our volunteers are attracted to our course as it lines up well with our content, so they may not have a lot of experience with ML
  • But we have some! And other volunteers might be interested in learning the content themselves
  • Sally: we did get some funding to work on a ML model - so this might be interesting for Thomas too
  • Suggested action for Thomas: reach out on general channel and offer to run a ML workshop - Tech Syllabus can help with pointers!

Greg Wilson

  • Ali: noticed that Greg Wilson (author of Teaching Tech Together) was offering Lunch & Learn in return for a donation to charity, so took him up on the offer and he a gave a talk at the day job
    • Apparently he & Barny were emailing recently too
  • So now have his email now and was thinking about asking him to come talk to us. Either to give one of his prepared talks or just fire questions at him
  • General agreement that this would be a good idea

❗Actions

  • Ali: Follow up with Berkeli re: the clone issues button work
  • Keith: Review the coursework for the new database module. And potentially look at making a solutions repo
  • Sally/Mitch: Catch up with Thomas in the next few weeks to talk about Python content, and what we could do next
  • Sally: Continue working on the new curriculum
  • Sally: Deploy the new syllabus on Netlify
  • Ali: Ask Greg Wilson to come talk to us
  • Ali: Investigate getting CodeMirror set up in the new syllabus

{2023-04-27}

Attendees: Ali, Daniel, Greg, Mitch, Sally

❗Actions from last time

📝 Agenda points

Curriculum Rewrite

Planning doc

Focusing on JS1 for now, and further modules to come in the future.

4-week module structure is arbitrary, we can be flexible.

Aiming for one major learning theme per week.

Most content in the planning board.

Greg is concerned that trying to identify single themes per week is misleading because everything is a thread that builds week-on-week.

Syllabus -> Curriculum

A syllabus is a top-line what you’re teaching. A curriculum is the sequenced details of how you teach it.

We have a curriculum. We should call it one.

Coursework via GitHub Issues

Ali recently went to a London class and observed the new GitHub-based coursework.

It took about 45 minutes to explain how to copy issues onto their own board, and still not sure it fully landed.

There’s a plan to build a GitHub application to do this, but until we have that running the workaround is to install an extension which clones issues. Which also requires access tokens and such.

In the mean time, worried the benefits and focus are being lost.

Greg demos latest “think like a computer"atron

Very cool demo :)

Next steps: Support some ES6

Ali: CodeMirror would be great for the presentation of the JS.

❗Actions

  • Mitch: Synthesise our assorted ideas for week themes into a proposal to discuss.
  • Daniel: Work with Berkeli to get the “clone issues” App shipped (spec and WIP PR).

{2023-04-13}

Attendees: Sally, Karen, Daniel, Ali

❗Actions from last time

  • Keith (with support), get Keith’s SQL material into the syllabus
  • Sally: Organise a regular joint PD & Tech syllabus team meetings - Carried over to this meeting.
  • All: Mind map for JS1 concepts - Probably didn’t happen, but Mitch and Sally have been doing rewrites anyway, so…

📝 Agenda points

PD Syllabus content to be in different files

Sally is building a swanky frontend which can collate views of the syllabus mixing in sources from assorted places.

Sally recommends: Just write the material wherever for now, and Sally will move things around as this launches. Don’t want to block PD from writing things up.

Focus on labelling content with competencies, so it can be easily moved around / re-linked to different weeks.

Workflows for editing

Would PD still be doing pull requests, etc?

No, basically building a workflow using Decamp CMS. Frontend can mix in content from arbitrary files from GitHub repos, will use a lightweight CMS which publishes to text files in GitHub.

We’ll need approvals to gate merging things from the CMS to GitHub - that will need to be built somehow into the CMS.

The Netlify CMS supports creating PRs - will probably start leaning on this once PD have worked out what their workflows should look like, but for now, will probably run in “publish with no vetting” mode to experiment.

How much GitHub experience do the PD team actually have?

Most of the people actively working on the syllabus right now are engineers or engineering managers, and are happy with GitHub, but a lot of the wider PD community are (understandably!) intimidated by it.

PD & Tech Syllabus meeting-up (define when/what)

What do we expect from the meet up?

Introduction, get to know each other, people’s backgrounds and focuses, etc.

In-person meet-ups generally lead to really high-quality high-throughput work outcomes. But everyone is super distributed. Ideally would get as many people in-person as we can, but may not be possible.

Possible themes for sessions:

  • How do we get the trainees to work together in teams from earlier in the course (particularly when they don’t have much coding or GitHub experience)?
  • How do we work well together across Tech and PD

Will arrange via Doodle.

Sally is going to happen to be in London the week of May 1st, may be a convenient, but many bank holidays in May.

Syllabus for Path/Tracks (QE, Cloud, PM, UI/UX)

Karen’s brief

Would like syllabus written up for tracks - new volunteers are finding it weird to not have central organisation to consult and update.

Sally’s counterpoints

The main syllabus is more chaos and full of lies than people realise.

Having a rigid formal syllabus disengages people from focusing on how they’re teaching and that people are engaging. Makes it really easy for people to create content, or just present information, and not interact and engage.

We really want people to learn, not to just tell people things.

General goals of a syllabus:

  • A place to codify consistent learning objectives
  • Record experience of what’s worked well and badly, lessons learnt, and e.g. exercises which have worked well in the past
  • Offering a repeatable, scalable experience

Valuable goals to produce:

  • Playbooks of how to run specific styles of seessions
  • A living culture of getting experience in class, then graduating volunteers up to more leadership roles

General agreement that syllabus isn’t a life-saver, but it would be useful to collate “things we’ve done that worked” somewhere.

Nobody actually reads the docs that are produced.

Why do we have a syllabus at all? An alternative is to lean heavily towards 1:1 mentoring. Syllabus should be a handbook to teachers: “Here’s how to teach this stuff”. But risk that this ends up as (ignored or poorly presented) lecture material.

What did we learn from CYF+?

There was no “teaching” as per normal CYF, but lots of mentoring.

Syllabus was explicitly designed not to be “this week you do this, next week you do that”, but to be remixable. Very project driven.

What are we actually trying to offer as CYF to enable volunteers to succeed in teaching?

Not much, actually.

Example projects we’ve seen work, and a community to talk to.

How would we maintain things?

We realistically don’t have the bandwidth to maintain 8 different syllabuses.

Idea that we would need to have a “lead” for each syllabus to maintain it.

Except in practice, this always becomes Sally’s job.

Do we know why people aren’t maintaining things? No, we’ve tried many things (making things “official”, centralising, federating, …)

How should people contribute material for re-use?

Developing a track doc. Example front-end track doc.

There’s a track template repo, module template repo, and coursework template repo.

Make new repositories based on them and fill out the information.

Really important to be clear that we don’t have capacity to reliably deliver more tracks than our main syllabus track.

❗Actions

  • Karen to specify requirements for PD syllabus edit workflow.
  • Karen to put together a Doodle of dates that work for her for a PD & Tech Syllabus meet-up.

{2023-03-30}

Attendees: Sally, Keith, Ali, Greg

❗Actions from last time

  • Keith (with support), get Keith’s SQL material into the syllabus
  • Mitch: Raise an issue for fixing JS1 in short term with acceptance criteria
  • Sally: Organise a regular joint PD & Tech syllabus team meetings
  • Ali & Mitch: share concept maps
  • Greg: tag Ali in on tidying up js1 coursework
  • Greg: put a meeting in for Sally to teach her how to write a block for CYF Blocks

📝 Agenda points

JS1 rewrite

Mitch:

  • Written an issue with acceptance criteria

  • Done draft of first week

  • Next steps

    • Write out mind map + agree on it
    • Others to pick weeks and write them

  • Github blocks should allow us to compose activities (so far only notes.md)

  • Sally: assume Sally will take care of the composition problem

  • Greg: composition: how to assemble the following for each topic,

    • the flipped classroom video
    • the practice exercises
    • the instructions for practice exercises
    • the coursework
    • the coursework solution
    • the summary for the benefit of volunteers/TAs

Single repo per module

  • Goal: get rid of google classroom in a way that’s useful to people
  • Contains issues = homework
  • Trainees get a board to help their planning
  • Viewable by week
  • Can get overviews that give us some insight into the shape of our coursework
  • Some development work happening to facilitate trainees getting the issues from the sample board (existing extension, to be replaced by our own batch clone)
  • Syllabus can pull in the coursework from github
  • Long term, if that works, everything related to the syllabus will go there
  • Can try with JS3 for GLA6 and LDN10

Think like a computer

Greg demos where he’s at with think like a computer so far

  • Mitch: “it’s fucking awesome” (sic)
  • Ali: what’s the value over a debugger?
  • Greg: definitely a good question to ask: meaningful goal = get a prototype, try it out with trainees and compare to teaching them to use the debugger.
  • Greg
    • Doesn’t just mutate state (e.g. variables in scope, go to next place in the callstack, etc.), but tell you what it’s changing. Particularly valuable, e.g. for the addition of arguments to scope when a function is called
    • Visualise “movement” (like passing around of post-its in physical think like a computer) - and specialised movement of callback functions
    • Because it tells you what it’s changing, it can be made into a quiz/“predict and evaluate” (and for different kinds of operation, either the computer could just do them, or it could pause and ask what will happen)

Flipped classroom content

Mitch

  • Produced up to JS3, with consistent supervision/creation from Mitch

  • Many small videos per week + practice materials

  • Lots of contributors from different locations

  • Negative: very time intensive to produce

  • Negative: in practice coordinating all the different contributors has been tricky

  • Doesn’t seem sustainable to even finish this for JS3 -> Mitch will stop at end of JS2 and post on Slack to see where LDN10/GLA6 want to go

  • We should make playlists going forward for JS3 that point to playlists on youtube

  • Greg: would prefer we did our content in house, at least for JS1-3, because it’s really good to have the right amount of context

  • Greg: concerned that the practice materials need to be really good and tied to the content

  • Greg: wonder whether having the degree of difficulty that’s been put in is the right degree (varying from mind-numbingly easy, to maybe slightly too complex, with the goal that every trainee should have found the practice material doable to some extent)

Recap materials

  • Greg: How do we collect the recap materials?
  • Greg: How do we retro on “what makes a good recap”
  • Greg: How do we scale recaps (make them so that any volunteer can run it with minimal prep)

Prison project

  • Sally: one video so far

  • Sally: offline version of codepen

  • Sally: haven’t solved Grasshopper + we’ll need to solve it inhouse also

  • Criteria for Grasshopper:

    • Content that’s not too boring
    • On phone
    • 6-8h

❗Actions

  • Keith (with support), get Keith’s SQL material into the syllabus
  • Sally: Organise a regular joint PD & Tech syllabus team meetings
  • All: Mind map for JS1 concepts

{2023-03-02}

Attendees: Sally, Keith, Ali, Greg

❗Actions from last time

  • Mitch: Invite Keith Bremer to a syllabus meeting
  • Mitch: Raise an issue with acceptance criteria (for restructuring JS1?)
  • Sally: Organise a regular joint PD & Tech syllabus team meetings
  • Ali & Mitch: share concept maps
    • Ali thought he had one for JS but can’t find it
    • We have the syllabus from Fatemeh -> Mitch or Greg should share

📝 Agenda points

SQL

  • Keith: has a background as a trainer for Oracle + long-term involvement in CYF
  • When you teach it: clear that there is not enough time to properly teach SQL
    • Locking
    • Transactions
    • Aggregate functions
  • Greg: worried that with a medium SQL module we are both failing advanced trainees who are not learning enough, and struggling trainees who need to practice writing small full stack apps
  • Greg: Wish that the last module was a “full stack apps” module with absolute bare minimum of SQL
  • Greg: Maybe we could have both?
  • Ali: Let’s gather existing modules that exists
  • Ali: ideally every module would be longer
  • Sally: maybe we should put databases earlier, so that trainees who like this could branch into it (maybe just before React?)
  • Sally: then have a bigger SQL module for them
  • Ali: the “frontend path” is not really frontend
  • Ali: might there be difficulty in recruiting volunteers for SQL?
  • Keith: could we have a beginning of SQL before node/react and then gradually build as we make our full stack apps more complex?
  • Maybe we should have a “taster module” with different parts of a full stack app (but how would we make it nicely decoupled)
    • Pitch workshops (so that you can just drop into them), maybe tied to job titles (a day in the life of…)
    • e.g. Data Engineering
    • How do we help trainees understand how things fit into the rest of the universe?
    • Has to be very hands on - exercises in various technologies?
  • Fits into the bigger picture of how to make practical projects that they work on every module
  • Structure of syllabus is pointlessly constraining
  • Let’s make projects / small increments as if we were already in the future where it all makes sense

1000 paper cranes

  • Could be for trainees near graduation to understand that a tool is just a tool and there are some underlying

ChatGPT

How can we support trainees in learning using it?

  • Great at variable naming
  • Given tests it can write pretty good code
  • It is not good at even slightly unusual requirements
  • It can’t admit mistakes / confidently doubles down or spouts nonsense

Someone wanted to join the syllabus team? Invite them?

  • yes!

❗Actions

  • Keith (with support), get Keith’s SQL material into the syllabus
  • Sally -> reach out to person who would like to join syllabus team
  • Mitch: Raise an issue for fixing JS1 in short term with acceptance criteria
  • Sally: Organise a regular joint PD & Tech syllabus team meetings
  • Ali & Mitch: share concept maps
  • Greg: tag Ali in on tidying up js1 coursework
  • Greg: put a meeting in for Sally to teach her how to write a block for CYF Blocks

2023-02-16

Attendees: Ali, Sally, Mitch, Greg, Daniel, Karen

N/A - apparently we haven’t made minutes for a while

❗Actions

  • Mitch: Raise an issue with acceptance criteria (for restructuring JS1?)
  • Sally: Organise a regular joint PD & Tech syllabus team meetings
  • Ali & Mitch: share concept maps

JS1 Week changes

  • What is the larger refactoring referenced in ticket? The complete redo of all JS modules
  • Want to make the smallest possible change
  • Any further questions should be recorded so we can discuss them in more depth
    • We’re interested in getting together to discuss goals - like we did with the fundamentals
    • Daniel: propose an experimental JS in the browser to see if it actually works
      • Put together a 1 day workshop and test with some trainees
  • JS in the browser
    • Greg: Would like to try this
      • Can we figure out a migration path to this in the current work
  • Flipped classroom shows that we have too much content in JS1W1
  • Mitch: only audited Week 1
    • Changing this will have a ripple effect for following weeks
    • Suggestion: create new files in which to make the changes - prevent scope creeping out into the main discussion
  • Greg: loops
    • Let’s not teach all of the types of loops together - keep it restricted in the syllabus
    • But keep a “glossary” of materials on other types of loops
  • Ali: Concept mapping
    • Can we try to map out the mapping of all the concepts we cover in JS
    • Decision: it shouldn’t block this round of work
    • There’s interest in syllabus development workshops
      • Mitch has a rough version of this, is happy

PD Syllabus

  • Karen from PD syllabus team
  • Currently mapping the syllabus
    • Compare tech vs PD syllabus
    • Trying to align soft skills that cross over between tech and PD
  • Ultimate goal is to reduce friction in final projects
    • But intermediate goal is to try find module splits for syllabus
  • Also keen for PD & Tech syllabus teams to work together
  • Sally: consider that we may be moving parts of tech syllabus around (particularly in JS)
    • Problem: the syllabus is inflexible
    • Tech syllabus is working towards making pieces more independent, so we can move around
    • Broadly we want to stay within a module format
  • Greg: we’re in favour of integrating with PD
    • Trainees have historically not looked at PD as “real content”
    • Separating the content into separate sites was not helpful
    • So have been working to move the content into the “main” syllabus
  • Greg: will PD modules map onto Tech modules e.g. feedback module would be taught alongside JS1?
    • Code review is similar to feedback
    • Tech picks up code review in JS1 - so makes sense to links these together
    • Greg: encouragement to revisit concept multiple times across
  • Daniel: super short term - Esma has lots of PRs open & how will we handle them
    • Karen has reviewed them
      • There’s some feedback from Sally - try to avoid things that are inaccessible
    • Reviewing the learning objectives are out-of-scope
    • Main immediate objective is to get into the syllabus
      • And then iterate from there
    • Should tech syllabus be involved at all? We don’t know
      • Daniel thinks that we can get through them
    • Sally: to make things easier, we could use labels for topics
      • Can filter PRs?
  • Ali: should we communicate the current/near future state of PD content, and that we want to iterate on it
    • Sounded like the consensus was no
    • Already put a message in the PD channels
  • Ali: is the split of PD & Tech artificial?
    • General agreement that it’s somewhat artificial
    • Having small teams is a benefit
    • We’d like to have more joint meetings

Codespaces

  • Sally: have created lots of small tickets
  • Want to encourage small contributions - Codespaces make this easy

New database module

  • Sally: a new database module has apparently appeared
  • We still like the database module that Keith Bremer wrote

❗Actions

  • Mitch: Invite Keith Bremer to a syllabus meeting
  • Mitch: Raise an issue with acceptance criteria
  • Sally: Organise a regular joint PD & Tech syllabus team meetings
  • Ali & Mitch: share concept maps

2022-11-24

Attendees:

❗Actions from last time

  • Open a ticket to add the Bandit to the terminal lesson (Sally) []

📝 Agenda points

Feedback from flipped classroom Q & A

Brief talk through Saturday flipped classroom presentation

  • Some discussion around the grouping of trainees on a Saturday:

    • Ask trainees how long they’ve spent on the prep work in a given week
    • May need to say in advance that someone in their group is going to be slightly/considerably more advanced than them
    • Very important to normalise the differentiation
    • Alternatively leave it vague who is strong/weak before grouping up trainees
    • If 2 people are trying to learn the same thing, say useEffect, then it makes sense for the useEffect people to work together
    • In general, the less they know specifically -> more mixed ability becomes possible
    • Could potentially get more frustration with people working at different levels
    • If we assume people are learning different things then groups don’t matter massively

  • Peer-2-peer collaboration will work better if trainees provide verbal explanations of how their code works

Video recording volunteers

  • Lo-fi recordings done with volunteers
  • Greg, very interested in helping with recordings - at some point in the future making some videos when he gains capacity
  • Will to observe something beforehand to see how it works

Welcome to Will

  • Welcome to Will who’s joining on syllabus! 🎉
  • Will was previously a mentor in 2nd LDN class in 2018

❗Actions

  • [] Mitch and Will to catch up on a module PR later this week

2022-11-10

❗ Actions from last time

Still copying forward the tasks from last time.

📝 Agenda points

React module team

  • Ali has been leading/encouraging progress but is going to be busy with moving soon
  • Ideas for getting increasing engagement
    • Could we invite them to the Summit in Jan?
    • Run an ideas meeting, encourage ownership/long-term vision
      • Sally has lots of ideas that they could try, potentially could join

Coursework Reduction

  • Sally created a bunch of tickets to reduce the amount of mandatory coursework
  • Do we know how long it takes trainees to work through the coursework
    • We’ve had a trainee who took 2 - 4 hours per week
    • But we’ve also had trainees take much longer
  • Idea: reorder the coursework
    • So trainees are doing the most important work first
    • Could potentially do up to the 20 hour deadline
  • Consistency
    • Can we make coursework clearer through consistency, so they’re more likely to do it?
    • Top priorities have a CodeWars exercise & PR to main coursework repo
    • Next is to review the solutions
      • A lot of trainees skip this, which may be a problem — don’t know which way the causality is around
  • Boilerplate classroom
    • Has a break down of coursework by week
    • Global syllabus should have access to this
    • It’s used to set up new classes — so editing this will affect all subsequent classes
      • There is a mechanism for updating existing classes, but it’s on the cities to do it
  • Goal of tickets: have a look through the tickets and see what can be removed
    • Some of the coursework might go, some might not
    • Just need to assess it

Flipped Classroom

  • Is the syllabus ready for this?
    • Has ZA made progress/notes on how well this has worked?
  • Sally moved coursework ahead 1 week
    • So trainees should be working ahead, seeing new concepts
    • And coming with questions to the next class
  • Have coursework items to prepare for the next class
    • Encouraged to come with questions
  • Mitch is planning to introduce flipped classroom model to NW soon
  • Concerns that flipped classroom model will heighten the “I don’t know what I’m doing so I won’t say anything” issue
    • Need to encourage a culture of sharing blockers/vulnerability
  • Think that just giving notes to trainees ahead of time isn’t enough
    • Mitch plans to work with experienced teachers to prepare recordings alongside grads
  • Training for software engineers to “get out of the way”
    • This was a suggestion that Ali had out of Mitch’s teacher training session: we need a session on “practicing”, basically solving exercises, pairing with trainees, etc
  • Will trainees come to class having written some code?
    • Some but not lots
    • Goal: they have an introduction and have started thinking about questions when they arrive at class
  • Syllabus tries to guide teachers on what they should cover in class
    • Do we need to go through it and add in some time for flipped classroom? Yes probably
  • Naming
    • “Flipped classroom” may have something of a bad rap, maybe we should call it something different

The Bandit

  • https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/bandit0.html
    • Levels 1 - 10
    • Challenges to SSH onto a box, and move around to find files, using various CLI tools
  • Was added to CYF+ syllabus
    • Sally did it, and thought it was good
  • We should add it to the main syllabus, as an stretch goal for terminal lessons

❗ Actions

  • Open a ticket to add the Bandit to the terminal lesson

2022-10-27

Attendees: Sally, Ali, Greg & Mitch

❗Actions from last time

(3 tasks put back in actions for next time)

📝 Agenda points

Check github actions for unit tests for coursework repos

  • need a ticket for this
  • unclear in how many places it is/isn’t running
  • @Ali is writing a ticket

Ali is moving

Problem solving workshop in WM

  • basics to help trainees with their problem solving skills
  • e.g. how do the start solving codewars: (understanding the problem, inputs, outputs)
  • biggest problem is “how to get started”
  • other problem is TV show: “giant function nightmare”
  • TV show project could be better scaffolded
  • Suggestions:
    • Maybe TDD could help
    • Starting earlier with complexity
    • Adding katas
    • Scaffolding for how to solve the problem (how much scaffolding is too much? too little?)
  • TDD intersecting with scaffolding (pre-writing tests)
  • Write some broken implementations
    • Need to make a change
    • Easier with an existing test suite -> helps
    • Need for a new test
  • We don’t expose students to (good or bad) code
  • What are we taking out of the course/coursework to make room for more problem solving?
    • And the job market
    • And the TDD
    • etc.
  • We could make a lot less coursework mandatory
  • Need a doc with some requirements
    • probably starting with TV Show is the wrong place
    • break down the requirements -> and then figure out how we can distribute them

Goals for TDD discussion next week

  • Sally will make a post where we can post agenda points
  • Greg has started working on a document

❗Actions

  • [] Sally: Post the fundamentals job ad
  • [] Greg: For js2, create at ticket to create an exercise that can be done with both Blockly and Javascript
  • [] Greg: Write a ticket forming a module team for Fundamentals (possibly with some steps that can be checked off)

2022-10-13

Attendees: Sally, Ali, Greg & Mitch

❗Actions from last time

  • Sally: For HTML Karma-clone, create a ticket for a “build a hamburger” exercise that can be done with Blockly
  • Sally: Organise a discussion around TDD incorporation

📝 Agenda points

Syllabus team recruitment

  • Keep on the lookout for new members of the Syllabus Team

4 week React

  • React module is being converted to 4 weeks ( along with all other modules )
  • Potentially split week 1 - too densely packed at the moment
  • S Africa very good at trialling new stuff - good place to trial new 4 weeks React

Netlify deployment PR

❗Actions

  • [] Sally: Post the fundamentals job ad
  • [] Greg: For js2, create at ticket to create an exercise that can be done with both Blockly and Javascript
  • [] Greg: Write a ticket forming a module team for Fundamentals (possibly with some steps that can be checked off)

2022-09-29

Attendees: Mitch, Greg, Sally

❗Actions from last time

📝 Agenda points

Forming a module team needs more work that being an “action point”

P2P learning

  • should read and comment document
  • should trial it (smaller city sounds easier than London)
  • trial would have to have people (i.e. Mitch) be involved very directly to build up the culture
  • having coursework on wednesday sounds really good

Employer feedback

  • incompetence with git (commits that are too big, merge conflicts, poor commit messages and PR titles)

Sally video for trainees

  • what CYF is and isn’t

❗Actions

  • [] Greg: For js2, create at ticket to create an exercise that can be done with both Blockly and Javascript
  • [] Sally: For HTML Karma-clone, create a ticket for a “build a hamburger” exercise that can be done with Blockly
  • [] Greg: Write a ticket forming a module team for Fundamentals (possibly with some steps that can be checked off)
  • [] Sally: Organise a discussion around TDD incorporation

2022-09-15

Attendees: Barath, Lorenzo, Ali, Sally, Mitch, Greg

❗Actions from last time

📝 Agenda points

Barath’s marvellous machine 🤖

(Raised by Sally)

  • Barath started explaining certain concepts in JS like how array methods work

  • Starting with an mental image and forming words to explain the particular concept - difficult with non-native speakers

  • Barath wanted to devise a more visual way of explaining some of the concepts

  • Built an awesome UI to visualise how some of the JS array methods work

  • Enables you to change the input array elements, the iteratee and the array method you want to visualise

  • The app can be found here

  • Will really help with difficult concepts like the difference between map and forEach

  • Great to extend this kind of visualisation app to other things like async code and HTTP requests

  • Great to think about how we can use tooling to really get the most out of our trainees

  • Next steps… 👣

    • Barath will continue using with LDN9
    • Try it with a running cohort
    • Get feedback and survey the trainees
    • Possibly create a smaller version and make other methods discoverable ❓

CYF cloud track 🌧️

(Raised by Sally)

  • This is a Postgrad module
  • Pedro originally ran an informal version of this course - people would go away and study something and then come back to discuss it
  • Tension between teaching something interesting vs teach something step by step that is useful to a company
  • Trainees can use free tier AWS accounts - but will be billed if you make mistakes
  • Plan has been created here for the CYF cloud track
  • Possible dates: Saturday 17th / 24th September
  • Course is going to be more like a discussion with Q&A
  • Focus of module: have some sort of application that you need to deploy
  • Want to support unbanked students as part of digital inclusion so they can access platforms like AWS
  • Need to get the balance right between videos and resources and independent learning and too many passive videos
  • Sometimes trainees can get lost if the steps aren’t clear and they’re given too much independence - then have to introduce more structure
  • This ties in with some of the emerging issues re peer-2-peer learning

Sprint planning / ticket taking 🎫

(Raised by Sally)

Autumn winter goals ⚾

Greg: Syllabus work for JS1 / JS2 with Richard, Transition materials for Blockly Ali: Teacher training pair up, Develop teaching community in London, Mitch: MVP Teacher training write up, Everyone: Continuing to incorporate TDD into syllabus, Organise a meetup to discuss JS1/2/3 and our goals

TDD 🧪

(Raised by Ali)

  • Confusion around Enzyme raised by someone in Slack
  • TDD asked for more and more by trainees and employers
  • Useful way to teach new stuff
  • Don’t really teach how to write tests at the moment
  • Don’t actually run the tests either too
  • Having tests that run in the browser is a potential goal
  • Tasks broken down with writing a test for each requirement:
    • 1 a) Write a test that asserts some func returns []
    • 1 b) Write a test that asserts some other requirement …
  • Scaffolding for how to write tests properly with red-green-refactor etc
  • Need to keep modelling good TDD practices over multiple weeks

❗Actions

  • [] For js2, create at ticket to create an exercise that can be done with both Blockly and Javascript
  • [] For HTML Karma-clone, create a ticket for a “build a hamburger” exercise that can be done with Blockly
  • [] Form a module team for Fundamentals
  • [] Organise a discussion around TDD incorporation

2022-07-21

Attendees: Sally, Apoorva, Greg, Mitch

❗Actions from last time

  • Sally: send list of some more people for React module team
  • Ali: chat with Lily about more people for React module team
  • Ali: coordinate with applicants so far for React module team
  • Sally: follow up with ZA at some point about why they needed to conduct interviews

Fundamentals feedback

  • Feels like we need a lot of TA support for Fundamentals
  • Add something to the module coordinator notes to think about the number of TAs required for a Fundamentals session
  • TAs not assigned to a room in Scotland - so they all jump around
  • They need experienced people to guide them when they go off piste
  • LDN9 is a completely new group of volunteers - so good test of our unspoken assumptions
  • Covering a lot of blocks in the Fundamentals course
  • A lot of pushback from trainees, why are we using Blocks - like kids stuff
  • Found the Blockly fundamentals homework overwhelming
  • Greg: The split up of the homework was arbitrary - so we can rearrange it so we can add some more homework to Week 1 if required, for example
  • A section on MVP in Week 2 - not realistic for it to be completed in 10 mins - more like 20 & 20 or 15 & 15
  • Students said stuff “user stories” wasn’t important
  • Fundamentals will give students a better though far from complete impression of what being a software engineer involves
  • Come up with a concrete outcome for the coursework - as trainees struggle to follow more abstract instructions
  • Trainees are very wary of people in institutions - experience of being lied to etc
  • Some things like create a discussion in a slack thread aren’t happening
  • Smaller spaces with games and retreat spaces good for breaking up large classes with 50+ people
  • Rainbird and interview selection figures are very similar - vindication for Rainbird!
  • Assumption that Fundamentals is different because Fun is a lot bigger than the rest of the course. Fun was supposed to be capped to 40 and come down to 30 for the main course
  • Want to get a reduction in the early course dropout rate - target for next year
  • 60+ for fundamentals is too big!
  • Need to keep encouraging trainees to ask questions in main channels and not DM TAs
  • Asking questions, handling conflict are all essentials skills we need to keep developing in trainees as they progress through the course

Immersive program

Teacher training

  • Currently running 2 iterations of the teacher training course in West Midlands and North West. West Midlands -> completely remote, North West -> Hybrid.
  • Current format involves 4/5 x 2 hour workshops ( with plenty .of attendee participation and engagement). Using Miro to collect ideas - working well thus far.
  • Course structure so far: take a section from a Saturday session and over the course of the workshops discuss and plan a short 20 - 25 mins lesson. The idea being that attendees ultimately feel more confident and empowered in taking on and delivering a section of the course.
  • End of the course, Mitch is going to deliver the 20/25 mins of teaching that was planned and deliver it to the trainees on a Saturday class. Then volunteers will get the opportunity to observe what was successful and what can be improved next time
  • Emphasis on planning and teaching as an iterative process

❗Actions

  • For js2, create at ticket to create an exercise that can be done with both Blockly and Javascript
  • For HTML Karma-clone, create a ticket for a “build a hamburger” exercise that can be done with Blockly

2022-07-07

Attendees: Greg, Sanyia, Ali

Actions from last time

  • Sanyia: to speak to potential Deliveroo candidate for global syllabus team
  • Sanyia: start onboarding for Tom Daly for React module team
  • Sanyia: speak to Carmen from Deliveroo for React module team

React module syllabus team

  • We have a team of 4 (including 1 grad) forming

  • Ali is arranging a kick off call with them, likely next week

  • Sanyia has a third Deliveroo person interested in volunteering

    • Since we have a team forming, we think it’s best to hold them in reserve for now

    • They are interested in hands-on teaching in London, so possible a syllabus team wouldn’t be well suited for them - suggested connecting with London organisers since London 8 are currently doing final projects and they nearly always use React

    • Since we have a team forming, we think it’s best to hold them in reserve for now

    • They are interested in hands-on teaching in London, so possible a syllabus team wouldn’t be well suited for them - suggested connecting with London organisers since London 8 are currently doing final projects and they nearly always use React

  • Ali to write down some ideas for what the team could work on in the first few months

Blocky

  • Greg still owes some review to Mitch

Missed agenda items

  • Sally had other meetings running over, but had some agenda items which we can cover next time
    • 4 week revision update
    • Cyf+ update

2022-06-23

Attendees: Sanyia, Sally, Ali

Actions from last time

  • Sally: send list of some more people for React module team
  • Ali: chat with Lily about more people for React module team
  • Ali: coordinate with applicants so far for React module team
  • Sally: follow up with ZA at some point about why they needed to conduct interviews
  • Greg: set up a debrief with ZA (pending) - action!
  • Greg: create a ticket for cypress testing in blockly - action!
  • Ali?: take some time to review/give love to the group projects repo: https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/group-projects
  • Ali: Recruit React Module Team (done-ish) and set up kickoff call

❗Actions

  • Sanyia: to speak to potential Deliveroo candidate for global syllabus team
  • Sanyia: start onboarding for Tom Daly for React module team
  • Sanyia: speak to Carmen from Deliveroo for React module team

React module team

  • Sanyia has 1 definite joiner from Deliveroo, and 1 maybe joiner from Deliveroo
  • Only 4 people have responded so far

Global syllabus team

  • Daniel leaving - looking for a syllabus team backfill (Sanyia may have someone in mind from Deliveroo)

Upcoming work

  • Sanyia - reactification of blocks
  • Daniel - involved in creating an accelerator program to get students ready for high performing jobs (e.g. slack)
  • Greg - cypress + contributing to blockly
  • Ali - group projects

2022-05-26

Attendees: Daniel, Sanyia, Sally, Ali, Greg

Actions from last time

  • Greg: set up a debrief with ZA (pending) - action!
  • Greg: create a ticket for cypress testing in blockly - action!
  • Check how solid the module teams are at the moment - Sanyia
  • Ali?: take some time to review/give love to the group projects repo: https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/group-projects
  • Ali: Recruit React Module Team (done-ish) and set up kickoff call
  • Ali: Call with Elizabeth working on getting the PD changes merged into the fundamentals syllabus

❗Actions

  • Sally: send list of some more people for React module team
  • Ali: chat with Lily about more people for React module team
  • Ali: coordinate with applicants so far for React module team
  • Sally: follow up with ZA at some point about why they needed to conduct interviews

React module team

  • Only 4 people have responded so far
  • Possibly not enough critical mass/skill so far?
  • Maybe need clearer info about what applicants should tell us?

Windows machines

  • What are the options for students starting on Windows?
  • Windows is “banned”, WSL(2) is just not effective - the issue is the amount of support + create-react-app takes forever
  • Can’t get anyone to build a boot drive for Linux (even after offering money)
  • Enforce after the Fundamentals
  • If machine not powerful enough to dual boot Linux/Windows -> get them a laptop
  • Mac is ok (ish).

Github teams

  • Why is Ali getting pinged about adding people to github?

Upcoming work

  • Sanyia - reactification of blocks
  • Daniel - involved in creating an accelerator program to get students ready for high performing jobs (e.g. slack)
  • Greg - cypress + contributing to blockly
  • Ali - group projects

Many people in Fundamentals in NW

  • Multiple cohorts?
  • Don’t need fundamentals to be selective
  • But not good to try to run a cohort with not enough volunteers

2022-05-12

Attendees: Sanyia, Ali, Sally, ??

Actions from last time

  • Greg: set up a debrief with ZA (pending) - action!
  • Greg: create a ticket for cypress testing in blockly - action!
  • Ali: set up a Blockly Reactification call - action!
  • Open issue for slack exercise in Week 1 - Sally
  • Recruit people for React module team - Ali
  • Check how solid the module teams are at the moment - Sanyia
  • Talk about new Fundamentals with WM - Greg
  • Arrange another call for markdown parser - Ali/Sanyia

Report from Hack your Future summit

CYF was an early spinoff of HYF. Different in following ways

  • Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark
  • Operating on a franchise model (with own leadership and staff)
  • Different outcomes because e.g. Netherlands has an apprenticeship model in the hiring companies
  • Don’t graduate people until they are ready (part of how they’ve improved their outcomes)
  • Not as much volunteer engagement/ownership
  • Completely different curriculums in each franchise (w/ legal agreement that if outcomes are not met, franchise is revoked)
  • In Denmark, companies pay to go into HYF to run a master class.

HYF Belgium super interested in LearnLab. They would like to share/collaborate on curriculum

Many projects we might like to fork and use + early JS modules.

StudyLens tool might be interesting/useful https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/study-lenses

Should potentially interact with HYF syllabus people in general.

React Module Team

  • Advertise for it
  • Come up with commitments required of team
    • time
    • regular meeting (chair, minute taker)
    • visibility (minutes)
    • syllabus team member to come in for some amount of time to help bootstrapping)
    • review PRs, including to coursework
    • talking to teachers/gathering feedback
  • 3-5 members is the sweet spot
  • Need to ensure they take ownership: so far, no “here’s some ideas, here’s where we’d like to take the module”
  • Need to discover what the contract that gives power, responsibility and ownership looks like
  • If we wanted module teams to come to us with “major changes”, would have to define what “major change” means.
  • How would the module team interact with syllabus team?
    • Maybe 2-4 x per year retro will all?

Fundamentals

  • ZA are going to do some interviews following fundamentals

Miro

  • Mitch: is there a CYF MIRO board account?
  • Greg: maybe can manage with free account?
  • Sally: we have Figma for ed

Unconfuse Greg

  • PD portion will be in the fundamentals syllabus
  • Sally’s code review sessions are for Buddies: how much code review to do, good strategies for working with buddy groups, making sure that people know how to use github, etc.

CYF online?

In order to happen would need to solve

  • People are often isolated - doing CYF online does not help much with that
  • Meetup in person has much better outcomes for English
  • Meetup in person has better well being and employment outcomes
  • City based meetup means volunteers are embedded in the local tech scene, where the jobs are

Misc

  • Have had applications to 4-week-ify the syllabus
  • Classwork is setup in google classrooms (ready to be cloned an can be set in advance)

❗Actions

  • All: take some time to review/give love to the group projects repo: https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/group-projects
  • Ali: Recruit React Module Team and set up kickoff call
  • Ali: Call with Elizabeth working on getting the PD changes merged into the fundamentals syllabus

2022-04-28

Attendees: Shaun, Sally, Denver, Greg, Mitch,

Actions from last time

  • Sally: move meeting invite to Thurs
  • Greg: set up a debrief with ZA (pending) - action!
  • Sally: share intro to CYF slides with Greg
  • Ali: set up a Blockly Reactification call - action!
  • Greg: create a ticket for cypress tesing in blockly - action!
  • Daniel: progress JS1 module project

WMCA deal

  • A lot of work to adapt the course to the requirements of the WMCA
  • Not signing the deal - too much work to contort the course

ZA Fundamentals (Denver)

  • Well received thus far after 2 weeks
  • Liked/learned/loved retro - mostly liked :)
  • CYF blocks was well received
  • Lack of JS syntax in this section
  • Students expressing desire for physical class

Blocks

  • Some display problems for some machines
  • A few other issues occurring for some trainees
  • Denver and others to document all the issues that arose from this iteration of Fundamentals
  • Clarity needed about how objectives are related to the lessons at the moment
  • Trainees usage of Zoom - use of “Raise hands”, Slack chaos at the moment - need a session on effective use of Slack
  • Non-audible learners - discrepencacy between use of Slides and non-use of Slides
  • Insufficient number of mentors at the moment, half a cohort in a single breakout room
  • Shaun and Denver solve Slack chaos - create a solved and issues thread to order some of the messages
  • Add slack exercise on week 1 - we can add previous exercise from earlier Fundamentals version
  • Slackbot encouraging students to post on Slack ?
  • 4 high level goals of fundamentals- how are they doing ?
  1. I’m part of a cohort
  • Super chatty, too chatty ?? 😛. Meeting up independently
  1. Start as we mean to go on
  • Some students not completed homework but most handed in
  • Split trainees ( 4 per mentor ) for mangeable workload
  • Not deep marking, more “Is this work complete?” - deep marking not scalable
  1. Breaking down problems
  • Enjoying the games used in Fundamentals so far
  1. Shipping it
  • Everyone successfully shipped by week 2!

Training for TAs/teachers

  • Arrange CFY teacher training

Reamining Blockly PRS

  • Greg to check and merge these PRs
  • Wait for other PRs to get merged before tackling “Greater than 11”

Teacher training thus far

  • 5 people attended last Saturday
  • Material still in development
  • Live streaming + recording coming soon

Module teams

  • Recruitment doc for React module peeps

Blockly toolbox parser

  • Sanyia to go through the toolbox parser PR and the current approach

❗Actions

  • Open issue for slack exercise in Week 1 - ?
  • Recruit people for React module team - Ali
  • Check how solid the module teams are at the moment - Sanyia
  • Talk about new Fundamentals with WM - Greg
  • Arrange another call for markdown parser - Ali/Sanyia

2022-04-13

Attendees: Sally, Greg, Daniel, Ali, Sanyia

Actions from last time

  • Sally: Sanity check fundamentals - done
  • Daniel: Ticket for shop idea - still outstanding
  • Greg: Ticket for project - still outstanding
  • Greg: Coordinate with ZA on feedback - done
  • Sally: Ticket about devtools - done
  • Mitch: PRs for blockly - done

Agenda points

  • New meeting time
    • Thurs is the new day!
    • 7:30pm
  • ZA doing Fundamentals module
    • General positive feedback
    • Asked interesting questions
    • Found a bug, got fixed
    • Issue - Teacher might miss the wider picture/general goal
      • Suggestion: cheatsheet of goals for each exercise
      • Also can we integrate this in such a way that involves trainees - so they don’t get distracted with the wrong goal
      • Did the mentor notes not get read?
        • Greg would have to ask them
  • JS1 module project
    • https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/syllabus/issues/421
    • …Sorry, missed a bit - had to get the door…
    • Goals
      • Get reviewer to think about how they express themselves - nudge towards answer
      • Get trainees thinking about how there are different perspectives on code
    • Why is just telling the answer a problem?
      • The suggested exercise is structured so that the reviewer would know the correct code. I.e. there’s no code problem solving for the reviewer. Instead the goal is to write a response without “giving away the answer”
    • Sally showed the idea to her brother (who does lots of code review)
      • His criticism was that restricting what can be written in the response is artificial
      • He suggested that we give “canned messages”/“cards” that trainees could pick from
        • Some discussion of how these cards are structured
    • Peer review has been a struggle in the past
      • Trainees just give “pointlessly” positive feedback - no actionable feedback
    • We could experiment with a small group of trainees to see how it goes
    • Next steps
      • Daniel to write up a PoC exercise and trying it out with some trainees
  • OpenClass
    • Course-making interface
      • Ala Google Classroom
    • Structured around mastery concept - have to demonstrate mastery of a concept before moving on
    • Can have a free, whitelabel environment
    • Courses are remix-able, so could have a core course that could be tweaked
    • Next steps: think about it
  • Greg’s presentation at Blockly summit
    • Are there some intro to CYF slides? Sally to share with Greg
    • Anyone available to review? Sally should have some time. Ali potentially too
  • Shout to Mitch for making easy-to-review PRs for Blockly!

Actions

  • Sally: move meeting invite to Thurs
  • Greg: set up a debrief with ZA
  • Sally: share intro to CYF slides with Greg
  • Ali: set up a Blockly Reactification call
  • Greg: create a ticket for cypress tesing in blockly
  • Daniel: progress JS1 module project

30-03-2022

Present

Sally, Greg, Daniel, Mitch

Agenda Items

Sanity check Fundamentals

What is the project?

  • Week 1: ship personal home page (from intro to digital)
  • Week 1: imaginary user stories for imaginary project
  • Week 2: defining user stories for own website
  • Week 2: choose a user story
  • Week 3: do some more of it

We floated the idea of a “shop” page

Step 1) make what we have make sense, let’s start with

  • @Greg: Make a ticket for making a project
  • @Daniel: we can make a shop -> make a ticket for it
  • @Sally: consolidate current version to make sense, based on improving the personal home page

Coordinate with ZA on what feedback we would like

— how long homework takes — do they want some padding out of homework

@Greg will look into coordinating that w/ Lana

Blocks

@Mitch will be raising some PRs for blockly @Sally will create a ticket to add a piece about mentioning devtools (bigger idea for console: good exception messages based on the available ideas)

Teacher training

Mitch trying out things in Manchester Tried to build on “imagine you were teaching fundamentals”, what concepts would you teach? How would you teach them? (analogy, example, etc?) Attendance: grads + experienced teachers

Sally has a contact with someone from “Coders who teach”

Code review

Sally wants to do some sessions on code review Grading is cancelled, but code review is really valuable How do we make it low effort for mentors? (so there isn’t a spread between super detailed and not done) Buddies doing code review?

  • it’s high effort for the first review (grok what the exercise is about)
  • it then gets mostly ignored

Students doing code review?

  • sometimes poorly informed

Ideas for getting code review to happen, how to make it valuable and useful

  • students should have to modify based on review
  • ship it (confirmation that it’s good)
  • review is the precursor for working together

@Daniel and @Sally will work on Code Review module project for JS1 Bigger ideas can come later.

Entry and exit criteria

Final projects already has an entry criteria (be ready to contribute to a final project) And it needs to have an exit criteria that is clear so that people are not surprised when they are told to they need to do their own final project e.g. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jMxqI0L7IKFENCQ8Lw-D1lhnj3c3RZI_WK808wG4YJM/edit#heading=h.8bipiccmzk3c

For other modules

  • module projects -> DECIDED
  • maybe a small set of “if you don’t have skill X, that’s definitely not ok”

What will we do with our entry/exit criteria? -> something to think about

4 week restructure

Still need to make progress on it @Sally pay someone to do it

TDD

Greg learnt some stuff

  • the rules of engagement of TDD need practice (what am I allowed to modify when?)
  • Creating exercises that incrementally build a piece of functionality would be useful (then taking that scaffolding away)
  • Solving an exercise with TDD takes a really long time at first (1h+ for 4-5 tests)
  • Setup can be tricky (esp for react) - or more specifically, troubleshooting if something in the setup is wrong or you tried to do it by hand

Greg no longer available on Wednesdays

@Daniel will do a doodle

03-02-2022

Attendees: Ali, Greg, Sally, Daniel, Mitch

Agenda

  • Celebrating fundamentals
  • Welcoming Sanyia
  • Sprint planning
  • Plan for 2022

Celebrating fundamentals

  • Woop! 🎉 Go Fundamentals - now published!
  • Fundamentals training starting on 12th Match for S African volunteers
  • Fundamentals starts in April with South Africa Class 2

Plan 2022

  • Improve student tracking
  • Further empowerment of module teams
  • Cross module threads: code review, TDD, problem solving
  • Problem solving
  • Integration with PD
  • Working on students with code reviews
  • Module contracts - Well defined prequisites and outcomes for any module on the course
  • Iterate on module template for Code Your Future
  • Succession planning: learning how to hand things over in a sustainable way 🤔

Module teams & expectations

  • Work needed to ensure that module teams are meeting regularly
  • Getting alums to attend syllabus meetings - really valued input as they’ve just done the courses
  • Make teams more accountable on Slack - have bots that remind about meetings in public channels ?
  • Someone could join JS2 to support them with getting through some tasks
  • Do we need syllabus team folks to join the module teams to get them going ( time limited )

Welcoming Sanyia

  • We welcome Sanyia to the Syllabus Team
  • Software Engineer at Deliveroo Started at CYF 2 years ago
  • Some node module changes proposals ( Barath / Sanyia ) - Use of wordle in Lesson 3 of the Node module

Re the proposed Node module changes

  • Build a CLI tool in Node - fun standalone activity written in Node ( independent of http and network requests ) ?
  • Possibly add the activity to the 1st lesson in Node

Sprint planning

S Africa mentor training

  • Greg to lead with support from Mitch 12 March
  • Mention pedagogic techniques in remote environment: no slides, cold calling, screen sharing, live code demos etc …

❗Actions

  • (Daniel) Create a private channel for more private discussions See #cyf-syllabus-tech-private
  • (Daniel) Move 90% of tickets off the syllabus planning board
  • (Ali) Create module contract document
  • (Greg) Work out objectives for more TDD content in the future

2022-02-16

Attendees: Ali, Greg, Sally, Daniel

  • Fundamentals
    • What is left to do
      • Guidance
      • Copy across pair programming exercise from original fundamentals
        • Link
        • Where to fit it? Week 2
        • ACTION: Greg to figure out what needs to get done in blockly
    • Blockly
      • Now hosted here
      • Needs a quick intro in the syllabus
      • React-ifying
        • Ali made a start on a Blockly-React integration
        • But the next bit of work is probably to work on tabs etc
    • Looks like first fundamentals will be in April (probably)
  • What are we doing in Edinburgh?
    • Fill in missing gaps for fundamentals
    • Hackathon on Blockly
    • Priorities for Syllabus

2022-02-02

Present

Sally McGrath, Mitch Lloyd, Daniel Wagner-Hall, Greg Dyke, Ali Smith, Elizabeth Zeddie Lawal

Minutes

  • Meeting Elizabeth
    • New Head of PD & WM Lead
    • Starting in March
    • Vision
      • 360 PD
      • Local PD framework that can be implemented on a global level
    • 3 month plan outline
      • PD Content creation/consolidation
        • Develop bank of resources
        • Aim to mirror some of the writing style of Edu syllabus
        • Experiment & verify in WM
      • Look at PD structure
        • Content, Employability, Pastoral
      • Looking at how to showcase employability skills
        • How can we showcase our trainees
        • What are employers looking for and how can we embed that into trainees
        • Can we support employers to changing hiring practices (e.g. with DEI initiatives)
      • Understanding trainees with data
    • Wanting to be a fly on the wall - learn from syllabus team
    • Discussed how we want to work together more
      • It’s hard to split topics across PD/Tech Edu
      • Tech Edu don’t know what the PD syllabus is!
  • Scotland trip
    • To coincide with GLA demo day: 26th - 27th Feb
    • Daniel is moving, but happy for us to go ahead without us
    • Mitch was a yes (I think)
    • Sally is going anyway
    • Let’s set some goals in the week & get GLA folks involved
  • Fundamentals training for Cape Town
    • Lana was worried - messaging Greg & Sally
    • We could talk to them and walk them through it
      • Give specific guidance & support
    • Sally thinks they’re not starting for a couple of months
      • Hope to start on 5th March
    • Sally has proposed metrics for classes
      • So we don’t overstretch ourselves
      • Sally has talked to some schools about reaching targets before starting new class
        • But it’s ultimately up to the volunteers
      • Oridinarily Cape Town would start new fundamentals first
    • Try to capture some notes - that we could use as a basis for committed volunteer notes
  • Supporting schools with employment
    • Cape Town have access to Barny
    • Sally gave advice to keep working on projects etc
    • Ali’s direct experience: grads don’t have lots of useful stuff on their Github
      • Graduate module is supposed to help with this
        • But who’s responsibility is this?
        • Idea for improvement: after working on a group project, make sure they fork it onto their account, so that it shows up in the list of repos
    • Some grads need further work before they’re employable
  • WM update
    • Have now accepted the contract
    • Accepting ~100 trainees

2022-01-19

Present

Greg Dyke, Sally McGrath, Ali Smith, Mitchell Lloyd, Daniel Wagner-Hall, Sanyia Saidova

Minutes

  • Fundamentals syllabus outline is up - holes to fill
    • Blockly is currently just TODOs - up to Greg what that should look like.
    • Ship it - needs filling in
      • The first one we should do in class (because they’ll get stuck and need help), after that can be more flexible about shipping happening as coursework
    • Prayers
      • Main problem is prayers in the afternoon
      • The times can change - so we can’t specify breaks globally
      • It’s important for someone running classes to distribute a schedule (to trainees & volunteers) for the day beforehand so that any issues can be addressed
    • Sally has told coordinators this [I think]
    • Not sure who’s going to be the first class to do new fundamentals - South Africa and West Midlands are contenders, but unsure exactly when either will start their next course.
      • SA are doing their next course pure online.
      • We should probably be on-hand to help out with the first run or two (particularly for the Blockly stuff). Would be good to at least show up to a planning session before someone runs it.
  • Node syllabus: Sanyia has a PR open - tl;dr is to have trainees who haven’t got the pre-work to use the Heroku Walkthrough from a video, we should merge this PR in the short term while we consider bigger long-term changes.
    • Not sure if it’s over-fitting to the West Midlands session. Do others see the same issues? Some trainees didn’t have pre-work set up (e.g. glitch albums, heroku projects), and didn’t have Heroku context/background.
      • Scotland just didn’t bother teaching Heroku because it’s so fiddly and would be confusing.
      • Not sure Glitch is a great fit for CYF - it’s yet another surface, it avoids IDEs and CLIs and so on.
      • Long-term, we want a unified frontend / backend platform for “ship it” theme - rationalise onto consistent platforms trainees build up experience with.
      • Short-term: Sanyia has found a good video that introduces Heroku, which may help get people started.
        • Maybe in groups have TA share video and students code along.
        • Maybe this could be prep coursework, but that would take away ~60 minutes of content we’d need to replace in-class.
    • Scotland found trainees didn’t know what HTTP was (e.g. request types, paths, etc), so ended up filling a lot of content with that.
      • Also had trainees write a React app and then write an API to back it - ended up doing a pretty big rewrite, but covered most of the syllabus minus Heroku. Filled the time pretty well.
      • West Midlands class seemed to have a decent understanding of HTTP.
        • Not sure where they got this knowledge - probably just someone teaching well, as it’s not really good enough anywhere in the syllabus.
      • Scotland did a fairly big rewrite on the fly - may be worth folding a lot of it in.
    • A lot of time was spent teaching things like how to maintain a git repository - branches, etc.
    • Alternative could be to set up a repo that they all use which we maintain - would keep everyone doing the same, but may take away some of the understanding of how things fit together and what the stages are.
      • Is the Node module the right place to be following Heroku guides, or can we move this somewhere else?
      • One of the really nice things about the current set-up is that it gives rise to a lots of opportunities for discussion.
    • Thoughts on the City Guide / Paired Progamming piece (one person writes frontend, one writes backend, fit them together)
      • Probably the wrong time for it - the person doing React will probably not take as much from it (and may not remember React very well - we should also put in some work to make sure they don’t forget React at the end of the module).
        • In the long term, we should probably have them working on frontend and backend in concert to keep them practiced at it (e.g. quote generator, to do list, etc).
        • They’d also forgotten create-react-app, and also didn’t know how to integrate a frontend and a backend in one repo.
          • Greg has a starter repo we should look at and clean up.
      • Separating who implements each side isn’t a great iterative development experience - more likely to lead to significant integration issues.
      • Maybe we should enforce “swarm on both”.
    • We got past feedback from the SQL module leads that people weren’t particularly comfortable with Express.
      • This WM class don’t seem to have have this same issue.
      • Enough strong students in each breakout group meant people could work things out decently.
        • Unclear whether the weaker students could do it by themselves.
  • Learning Lab
    • Brief: Create a module project for JS2, introduce concepts of working in an agile team.
      • Introduce some of the key roles, some of the dialogues these roles may have.
      • Could maybe extend to have slackbots playing some of these roles.
      • Content is fairly simple, but questions around how we roll it out.
    • [Live demo]
      • Have set up a “Start a project” platform as a GitHub app.
      • UI similar to GitHub Learning Lab, but GitHub’s is a set of very step-by-step recipes - this is much more high-level “do a task, you work it out how”.
      • Step 1: Install Malachi Bot. Automatically files an issue introducing Malachi as the Product Owner.
    • When’s this for?
      • Slotting in around the content of JS2, probably mostly as an additional homework track.
    • If we end up reordering JS1/JS2 content, how much of an issue will that cause?
      • Let’s treat this like a prototype and see how it goes.
      • Split between two “tracks” - project managementy stuff, and “the actual code in the project being managed” stuff - the “actual code” part is customisable to changes, but the framework is really generic.
    • London start JS2 on Saturday - have two days to get something production ready.
    • Long-term, can hopefully introduce consistent concepts across the entire course (e.g. seem bots in same roles).
    • A lot of this content feels very PD-ish (though definitely with an Edu leaning), how are we engaging them?
      • The 4-week shift will hopefully make PD and Edu around each other more, and make it easier to pick up this kind of collaboration.
    • JS2 maybe should be solo, but how will we be turning these kind of things into group projects in the future?
      • We’ll iterate to work it out.
    • Tracking trainee progress
      • Currently entirely stateless, but we should start tracking more analytics.
    • Informally presenting at EdinburghJS tomorrow - Daniel will share link to talk.
  • Blockly
    • Have gathered feedback - most just needs actioning, some needs more discussion.
    • ID vs CSS selectors: Let’s just use IDs.
      • Had been thinking CSS selectors because it’s useful spaced repetition.
      • Exercises and projects don’t actually use CSS selectors in any interesting ways. Do we want to use them anyway?
      • CSS is probably overkill. Let’s just use IDs.
      • Some people also push the idea that you should only use IDs for interacting with elements from JS.
      • Also, people can build more on Blockly in the future if we need - don’t need to try to solve all problems in the first iteration of one module.
    • Generated code - how close should we keep to the styles we teach (e.g. arrow functions vs “function” functions)?
      • Using the function keyword may be useful because it’s self-documenting? Let’s do it.
    • Variables
      • Originally tried minimising use of variables.
      • Actually motivating variables well is kind of hard.
      • When doing a to do list, can’t do multiple DOM-context things manipulating values (e.g. an “at start” and “on click”) without variables.
      • Daniel to follow up with Greg offline about the second variables
      • How many of the projects actually need variables? If not many, maybe we can just strip them all the way back.
        • Will check.
        • A loop variable is something more than that - more the language storing something for you rather than you storing something.
    • What are the final exercises actually going to be, and do they really need to be as complex (particularly with arrays) as they currently are?
      • Greg willl look and consider.
    • What about duplication between Code.org and blockly?
      • Code.org does control flow stuff pretty well, but there’s a small subset we actually need.
      • Probably focus as much in Blockly rather than Code.org because Code.org is much nicer and we don’t want them getting frustrated.
        • Also want them to have as much TA support when starting off.
        • Can we upstream this stuff to Code.org in the long-term? Would be great to get more people using it, more people maintaining it, and get the Code.org polish on it.
          • Code.org seems very fixated on things like moving sprites around on screen, not sure why there isn’t much like what we’re currently doing.
    • Maintenance plan?
      • Move custom JS to a React app
      • Blockly is also a bit niche.
    • Tasks to do?
      • Greg to triage into must/nice/wishlist, and what’s best for Greg vs someone else to do.

Action items

  • Sanyia: Make minor edits to Node week 3 PR and merge.
  • Daniel Wagner-Hall: Follow up with Greg about variables Blockly question.
  • Greg: Triage Blockly issues into must/nice/wishlist, and claim ones that Greg should probably be the person to do.
  • Daniel Grant: Share EdinburghJS link in channel.
  • Daniel Grant: Make sure learning lab stuff gets deployed (via Pedro).
  • Sally: Organise a call for everyone to fill out Fundamentals GitHub repo over the next few weeks.

05/01/21

Present

Ali, Mitch, Chris, Sally, Greg

Minutes

  • Fundamentals
    • Sally worked out the timings (incl PD things): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nKm9cwfYzyPGt2W_P9GQPPavmnD5zFEeTTQTdOgpRVg/edit#gid=0
    • Red is immovable stuff, otherwise divided into planned work
    • Blockly
      • Greg’s planned schedule
        • Week 1 - Code.org, intro blockly, intro user stories
        • Week 2 - ? [missed this, sorry]
        • Week 3 - homework consolidation, delivery (reduced the amount of time to complete)
      • Still need to review v4
      • Code is still on Greg’s github - wants to transfer to CYF github
        • Sally volunteered to make it look nice :)
      • Greg has worked with Neill to develop the content
      • Idea from SA
        • Have a blank block editor - can be done via intro page
      • Project
        • Sally brought up idea of a “shopping cart” - scaffolded out by us
          • This might be constrained/unrealistic - would be dummy buttons
        • Greg was thinking about the landing pages will all be done
          • We need to nail down what this actually looks like - SA need to have time to build this out
        • Brainstorm some ideas for user stories to update a personal homepage
          • As a visitor to your home page, I want to leave a comment
      • Estimation exercise idea
        • Give user story, then make guess at number of blocks (or time?) needed to implement this, then actually implement it
        • Discuss the disparity between guess and reality
        • Learning outcome: estimation is hard
        • Learning outcome: how to “cut your losses” on a particular impl if it becomes complex
      • Delivery
        • Introduced early - drag/drop onto Netlify
        • No need to make it more complicated
        • Just reduce the amount of time to complete this over the 3 weeks
      • Greg’s Blockly principles:
        • let students write all their own code -> they feel greater ownership
        • indexing into arrays (and tracking variables with indexes, and for loops) is a complexity to be avoided at this stage -> everything is with push, pop and forEach
        • referring to “arrays” (rather than “lists” recommended by blockly), to avoid the confusion of lists vs html lists.
        • Scaffolding that fades:
          • pressing run
          • which specific blocks to use and where to find them
          • detailed step by step (only for introducing new blocks/concepts)
        • problem solving. Some exercises deliberately look into iterative coding, rather than coding everything at once
          • Lists of links
          • Arrays and html lists
        • Static html vs creation with blocks - main reasoning is that adding event listeners is cleaner against elements in there from the start (otherwise you get very deep embedding)
        • Generated code: it’s readable and at some point it’s worth taking a look at it (and definitely worth revisiting during JS1 or JS2) notes
        • Some missing functionality is a bit arbitrary
          • no string concat
          • the target element inside event listeners isn’t directly available
          • records (could use arrays within arrays rather than multiple arrays)
        • “At the start” does nothing except act as a container
    • Next starting class would be South Africa
      • Maybe: 29th Jan - Sally advised against this, so probably will be pushed back
  • Changes to JS modules
    • Moving to 4 week modules, but PD is spread out through the modules. Which means that the exercises need to move to a week 4 repo
    • We need to review the PRs before Sat, so Barath can teach in London
      • Suggested alternative strategy of moving changes to a fork
        • So that we can keep syllabus, exercises, solutions, etc in lockstep
        • Chris to follow up with Barath about doing this
    • Let’s try to focus on just moving the content across repos, we can follow up on updating/adding/removing exercises
      • We don’t really have a lot of capacity to review large changes
    • If we’re happy with the change then we need to make sure we’ve updated all the appropriate pages for exercises spreading out
      • Sally can ask Dom about doing this
  • Intro to Digital
    • Sally read a bunch of trainee’s code
    • One thing that came out of this: “what is frontend”
      • Discussion of composition of components - there’s a piece of the React module which isn’t really tied to React directly. Can we move this forward to e.g. HTML/CSS?
        • But this is out-of-scope for this piece of work
    • Sally put together: https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/CYF-Sass-In-React to discuss CSS theming/good practice
  • Syllabus is on master as default branch
    • This is the exception - most other CYF repos use main
    • Let’s move to main

Actions

  • All to develop 4 user stories for a Blockly “project”
  • All to review Blockly v4
  • Tell Nirmeet about changes to JS2 - spreading out of exercises
  • Chris to chase up Barath about changes to JS1
  • Move syllabus repo to main default branch

08/12/21

Present

Ali, Daniel, Sally, Greg

Minutes

  • Update on Fundamentals
    • Matrix spreadsheet
    • Graduation criteria
      • Was struggling without knowledge of specifics (e.g. exercises). Hopefully can now make more progress on this
        • However Ali (and we think Chris) are very busy at the moment
      • Need to get PD involved
        • Can mandate “testable” criteria
    • Blockly
      • Greg might need some support - since Mitch might not be available
        • Technical work is getting there
        • Need to work on exercise progression
        • Ali may have some time next week
        • Suggestion: Neill - Greg will ask him
      • Next steps
        • Needs some polishing in terms of the UI
          • What is the done state? Can’t be frustrating, but doesn’t need to look “professional”
            • No point in super polishing now, since we’ll want to iterate on it after first round of trainees using it
          • How much work is there left to get there?
        • Greg wants to get updated exercises ready for next Wednesday
          • Week after we’ll be in a better position to come up with a list of tasks - can prioritise from there
    • Requirements/Iteration/Delivery
      • Sally hoping to have a draft ready by next week
    • We think it’s on track 🤞
  • Daniel Grant’s JS2 project
    • Feel free to review
    • Steer towards to a structure replicable in other modules
  • TDD workshop
    • Sally has arranged a workshop for Scot5 & NW4
  • Cover letters
    • Ali has a job opening for CYF grads
      • Will give honest feedback based on interviews
    • Need a cover letter
      • This is a blocker for many trainees, we think because cover letter templates online often don’t line up with trainee’s experiences
      • Idea: can we create our own templates - something for PD

24/11/21

Present

Sally, Chris, Greg, Daniel

Minutes

  • Previous action items
    • Chris: Running through draft Fundamentals Learning Objectives
      • Largely removed all the stuff that’s unmeasurable, kept the stuff that seemed very important, and added new pieces based on our discussions.
      • Left some stuff which definitely needs PD input.
      • Need to think about how we are going to get input from the cities. Probably start sharing now-ish?
    • Daniel: “Requirements” week content. Currently blocked on: What is the multi-week project going to be?
      • Project thoughts:
        • Maybe similar to a personal home page, but with some different content?
        • Needs to be a website which does something.
        • Maybe about a product? (Can be real or fake product)
        • Some kind of online store where you can select a product and add it to a shopping cart (with the help of blockly)?
          • Just: View product(s), add product to cart. Very light shopping cart (basically: two lists - available products, and added products)
      • Mostly need to focus on Week 1 (Requirements) and Week 3 (Ship it) - Iteration is basically just “keep going”.
      • Need to give some thought to coursework, too.
      • End-points of each lesson is “Make sure you’ve done this week’s focus at least once, and keep going”
        • i.e. End of Ship It class they need to have shipped something to Netlify (because people will need hand-holding), and coursework is likely to be “Do more and make sure it’s shipped”.
    • What needs doing?
      • Filling in a few TODOs in the first session.
      • Put together an intro to the project session.
    • People seem to be enjoying Scrimba - maybe we should set more.
      • Scrimba is roughly: Kahn Academy, but you can pause the video, edit the code they’re writing, and run it. Interface is magic, and the trainees really like it.
      • We may have an in for a creator account - Chris will coordinate with Sally.
  • Greg: Data sturcture abstractions for Blockly
    • Beginners often struggle with classic for loops (need to manage a lot of concepts). while loops are easier to get started, and upgrading from while to for generally makes some sense.
    • Put together a linked list implementation using while loops.
    • Naming is hard:
      • Calling it a list is tricky because conflicts with the concept of an HTML list.
      • Calling it an array is tricky - doesn’t do indexes and such, and keeps some state.
      • forEach is maybe doable, and would be compatible with arrays, but most exercises involve previous/next.
      • Considered a circular data structure (works well for carousels, doesn’t work so well with e.g. lists of stories).
    • Use-cases: Problems on https://laughing-goldberg-6b25f5.netlify.app/
    • Probably just use a stack (or pair of stacks)? Push/pop make sense and carry forwards to arrays, isEmpty makes sense.
  • Getting stuff done
    • Sally will at some point just clear her calendar and get a bunch of it done (but can’t do it all).
    • Get a spreadsheet set up for how we’re going to time-box each of the topics we’ve discussed into a syllabus. Split into what just needs writing and what needs brainstorming.
  • Daniel Grant is writing a module project for JS2. Idea is very product-focused.
    • Introduce the roles of a typical agile team (product owner, scrum master, tech lead, developer, etc) in a lightweight manner (seeding ideas they’ll better understand via PD and in final projects).
    • Via a simulation of a project, with different roles prompting at different times.
    • First implementation: Notes in the syllabus. Future implementation: a conversational slack-bot.
      • Suggestion: Write out ~50 markdown files and experiment with them, not a slack bot in an MVP.
  • Dom Vineyard is thinking about a JS1 module project. May also involve a slack bot.
    • (Also has a background idea to integrate code review into slack with auto-completable common suggestions).
  • Greg is scheduling a Node chat with Kerim and Sonia - Greg will be the syllabus point of contact there.
  • JS1 team recruiting: No progress from Daniel, should hand back to someone else.
  • Dom put together a technical assessments proof of concept
    • One repo which has the solution in, tag with with magic comments, and pass it through a build step which removes the solution code and replaces it with a TODO comment.
    • Massive job, could be hassle for Code Your Future, but we could try to do it at some point.
      • We have a bunch of different styles of problem - unclear whether “just comment out some code” is a sophisticated enough model for our exercises.

Action items

  • Greg: Prepare post to share new Fundamentals Learning Objectives with the cities. Find and tag all the programme managers: @cyf-proms.
  • Sally: Push forwards Requirements sessions
  • Greg + Daniel: Hold brainstorming session for things we need to do.
  • Sally: Facilitate Greg + Chris to give feedback on Daniel Grant’s work in progress.

07/10/21

Present

Sally, Daniel, Ali, Chris

Minutes

  • Greg to continue to work on Blockly
  • Several grants have come through so we may have the ability to spend on the Syllabus team (early next year)
  • Fundamentals
    • Greg to continue to work on Blockly
    • Syllabus Team Goals: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fc-c9NZQPtBieftrvTXj3yiwU0HLBZ68bnagHja1NsE/edit
    • London 8 Results
      • Both tests that were run were good successes - Blockers and Shipping a Website
      • These have been merged into the current syllabus
      • The instructions were very helpful for Blockers
    • Exit Criteria
      • Could we provide a buffet of graduate criteria that volunteers can pick from?
      • Could we use a self assessment for the students>
      • Actions Raised
    • PD Content
      • How much time do we need for PD?
      • This should be interleaved as we’re planning to do for HTML/CSS
  • HTML/CSS (#LDN8 Plan)
    • Lucy (#LDN8 Teacher ) to include netlify
    • Attempt for interleaved PD through this module
      • Module extended to four weeks with 90 mins per day for PD
  • Module Gardeners
    • Ongoing search happening here

Actions

  • Chris: Ticket for KPIs for Fundamentals to be written
  • Chris + Ali: Over the next two weeks, work on the KPIs for Fundamentals
  • Daniel: Work on skeleton for two 90 minute sessions
  • Greg: Continue to work on Blockly

13/10/2021

Present

Sally, Mitch, Daniel

Minutes

Mitch is running the “intro to coding thinking” course at Cornerstone starting late October - 3 sessions, probably mostly offline.

Sally’s going to be out of the country for ~November

Sally hacked together a trainee tracker. Has also promised Candy she’ll hack together a PD tracker.

  • Seeking our input: Put some milestones in the course (clearly communicated up-front) where we explicitly make clear to trainees where we think they are.
    • Not intended to be blockers, just status check-ins.
    • Except end of JS3 - if the work hasn’t been done, won’t progress to final projects.
  • Most of the people Sally’s been working with are surprised by their status.
  • One milestone check-in led to a good conversation about someone who’d done lots of work but hadn’t shared it. Great outcome!
  • NW folks are way ahead of the milestones being set.
  • Need to make sure we have “here’s how we’re going to enable you to move forwards” paths for folks who are falling behind milestones.
  • “Next steps” outcomes Sally has collected
    • These conversations should start happening around JS3 to give people time to make change if they need/want.
  • QA: Don’t want to push people too strongly towards it because it can be easy to get pigeonholed in and hard to get out of if that’s not what you want.
    • Currently have no one wanting to go into QA anyway
  • A few folks did some extra learning before moving on to final projects, and joined another class’s final projects - this went really well (both for the folks who took extra time, and for the groups they joined).

PD team update

  • Approached Sally to ask about changing the whole syllabus
  • Want each tech module to be 4 weeks - get rid of PD weeks.
  • Want 90 minutes in every live session to do a PD session.
  • PD volunteered would need to be present for some of every class, and work more closely with tech volunteers.
  • Would want to theme PD work to support the tech focus of the week.
  • Stretching 3x 4 hour sessions into 4x 3 hour sessions sounds fine.
  • Questions around timings and consistency for volunteer engagement.
    • Probably want the PD session to be start or end of the day to avoid both tech and PD volunteers getting a bunch of extra down-time in their weeks.

Sally: Please review my pull requests!

Teacher Training

Mitch has opened up a PR for the to do list tests - please take a look!

Signing up to help form module gardening teams

  • Organising doc
  • Goals:
    • Get feedback (retros after classes)
    • Act on feedback (file bugs, fix bugs - small changes)
    • NO REWRITES. Come talk to syllabus team about things in general, and with big ideas. But NO REWRITES.

29/09/2021

Present

Sally, Chris, Greg, Ali

Actions

  • All: volunteer for a module
  • Chair for next time: Put off to next time

Minutes

Discuss way of working (alternating discussion and planning)

  • Put off to next time

Module teams

  • Each module team should be built up by one of us
  • action for all: volunteer for a module
  • Greg: could js1-3 be thought of as one module (see discussion about themes in JS modules)
  • All: discussed the value of thinking of them as 3 modules and agreed that for various reasons, it’s positive to have 3 modules (and 3 module gardeners)

Blockly

  • What are some of the khan academy criticisms this solves? Something they can understand and carry forward, something they can ship as a product
  • What do we “lose” from khan academy? Videos (we could write ours). Is is “as fun”. (Maybe yes, because “small god feel”)

Module systems

  • Yes, we should break out bits (filesystem to where we do terminal? npm to where we first introduce npm install?)
  • Can we come to a comfortable solution for one module system vs an other? (probably within CYF syllabus, we can just say “use this syntax here, use the other syntax there”)
  • where do we put it? import for react, require for node. Require for tests? but how do we write nicely testable code that also runs in the browser without a build system?

Student tracker

  • DEMO of how it works
  • Pro: lots of our best volunteers are edu buddies who spend time getting data that could be automated
  • Milestones? What milestones are needed?
  • Google classrooms API is not connected through
  • Would be nice to automate attendance (slackbot?)
  • Rate limiting of github API -> need to authenticate?
  • Could also pipe this into some notifications to buddies?
  • Not clear how we would “devops” this, beyond copy pasting into “prod” (could maybe write an application?)

01/09/2021

Present

Daniel, Chris, Sally, Mitchell, Greg

Minutes

  • We all did our actions this week!
  • Greg doesn’t know who New Order are (shockingly)
    • Sally and Mitch and everyone in Manchester to attend their upcoming gig
  • Meet Up
    • End of September sounds good
    • Most likely down in London
    • Action: Make a doodle
  • Big Changes Doc
    • We’ve all looked over it and have generally good feelings about it (or atleast greg did!)
    • Fundamentals - we’ve got months to make this change
    • Could we work on the badge schema sooner?
      • This seems like a smaller job - so yes
    • Action: Design a Schema for a badge (Sally)
    • Action: Setup Miro for brainstorming Fundamentals ideas
      • To be discussed next week at this meeting
  • London Feedback on the non-traditional route to Final Projects
    • This is working on a very small scale
      • But probably scale beyond this will be very difficult
    • This is a good signal
  • Tech Projects
    • Could we think about running a hackathon around some of these projects?
    • They’re fairly disfunctional right now so could be improved
      • As in - students could get more out of it, we could get more out of it

Actions

  • Action: Make a doodle for when to meet up
  • Action: Design a Schema for a badge (Sally)
  • Action: Setup Miro for brainstorming Fundamentals ideas
    • To be discussed next week at this meeting

18/08/2021

Present

Sally, Ali, Daniel, Richard Darby

Minutes

Guest: Richard Darby in Glasgow - they just finished JS2.

Action items from last time

  • GitHub Actions
    • They landed!
    • Plan is for buddies to only pay attention to coursework if it’s late or a trainee reaches out for help.
    • Coursework Tracker team are sprinting at the moment - goal is to notify buddies if coursework is late.
  • Chris to Write a brief for the “Add to Google Classroom” button from the Syllabus - rolling over to next week.

What do we teach and why?

Doc being discussed.

Purpose of doc: Communicating a very top-level strategy for what we teach and why we teach those things, and why we don’t teach other things. So that mentors/buddies/teachers/… get a general gist of what we’re trying to do, and help us decide whether to include things.

Tried to keep it very brief and concise. Tried to avoid making value judgements because don’t want to spend time in fights.

State

Sally didn’t end up mentioning anything about state.

React has a bit about state but it’s introducing both the concept of state and how React does it - can we pull the general concept of state earlier in the course to make this easier to handle?

Also, we perhaps aren’t setting up our trainees to be able to answer interview questions which require managing state.

Next steps

Daniel and Ali to make a few edits, then Sally to publish.

Bon code

Bon Code allow uploads of code and static analysis against coding standards. They seem eager for us to try them out.

Sally’s Big Presentation

Core problems:

  • Some people who make it to the end of the course aren’t equipped to become professional developers, which is what we promise them.
  • Making the course shorter for WM.
  • Making it easier to deliver the course in high volume in London and WM (but not assuming high volume for other schools).

Objective: Need to be able to track people’s aptitudes/progress, in a way that doesn’t rely on a volunteer directly assessing them, so that we can communicate progress and options to trainees. Be able to positively reframe “I enjoyed this but struggled with that” as specialisation (e.g. “become a UX designer”).

Chris: Could we just raise the level required to get on the course? (May affect whether we’re targeting the right people)

Hack Your Future rank their ITC graduates best to worst, interview the top 40, accept 30.

Don’t want our key demographic to be pushed out by sharp elbowed and technically eligible. We’d maybe be aiming at the middle of the ranking rather than the top - the top group can probably look after themselves.

Ali: One of the original ideas was to run Fundamentals a lot more regularly, so we could more easily say “Not now” rather than “No”. Designed to enable volunteers to say no.

We can talk about exits, but we need to have realistic options at those exits, otherwise we will always end up struggling to say no.

Course diversification

Want to create strands of achievements - people go through most of the course together, but at points split off and do different coursework to get practice with different roles in tech.

Preparing people for different roles or focuses while they’re still with us, rather than doing it ad-hoc after graduation.

Currently we end up picking up trainees more based on personal connection than by open offerings, and craft course that help them (e.g. cloud - Pedro is teaching a bunch of folks cloud stuff and we ended up with 16 hired)…

There are a lot of agency, WordPress, etc jobs, particularly in Birmingham, we can push people towards which maybe aren’t as prestigious as other jobs, but are perfectly fine jobs and which wouldn’t require too much extra teaching.

Chris: Are we being too reactive? If we were to plan based on what jobs are available, what would we do? Go from an objective, put together a team of volunteers to put together a course and design something outcome-oriented.

We’ve split at least two London classes, it’s probably the best outcome we could have had with them - we should be open about it and plan for it.

Revamping fundamentals

Trying to encompas all of the use-cases all of the different schools have.

London Class 8 starts September 25th and is going to be 66 people going through fundamentals. So unlikely to get revisions in by then. On current track, means 132 1:1 assessments!

West Midlands 4 and 5 will attempt to be two classes running simultaneously.

Manchester and Glasgow will probably be staying as-is.

Everyone agrees that getting together in class and doing the live session is what’s super important.

Scotland’s experience is that people go from Fundamentals into JS1 and are basically starting from scratch as if they hadn’t done Fundamentals.

Original goal of Fundamentals was to get the lowest-achieving trainees up to a place where they can complete the course, without making the course any longer, and treat it like a month-long interview.

WM are going to have to get through Fundamentals in 3 weeks because of funding constraints.

200 hours of interviews (as happened in London for class 8) is unsustainable, particularly if they’re too early to get good signal.

Current course is a bit painfully slide-heavy - was originally designed without slides, but PD is hard to teach off the cuff, so slide were born. The experience is also very different in different places with different teachers. Also the style of Fundamentals is hard to do in person.

Our new objectives in this new world
  • Know what’s missing from employability
  • Notice missing or redundant modules
  • Make sure module exit criteria map to entry criteria
Suggestion

3 live sessions of Fundamentals, 2 self-paced coursework tracks (which could be done over 3 weeks or a longer period). Technical (could drop), and Applied Digital Skills (PD).

In the session, have one technical project:

  • Take the home page they already made in ITD.
  • Learn what a user story is, and implement one
  • Deploy to GitHub pages so it has a URL.

At end of Fundamentals, get badges:

  • Have created a CV.
  • Have sent a professional email.
  • Have created a website that you can show off.

If you achieve all four badges (+ any other qualification criteria), you’re on the course.

Move interviews to after Fundamentals - can only do it after getting your four badges.

Why do we lose people?

At interviews:

  • Not having time to commit
  • Really lacking language skills
  • Clearly not understanding their code

After Fundamentals or in first few months of course:

  • Medical
  • Life change, e.g. work shifts change
  • People who should realistically have never gotten onto the course but no one had the heart to turn them down

People who are successful in one area tend to be successful in all of them (e.g. turning up to class, doing homework, doing Code Wars, etc). People who miss any tend to miss most.

Hard to evaluate without them actually trying out the course. Which was originally a key motivator to Fundamentals.

Badges

Each badge has 3 levels. Host the badges externally somewhere.

Half a badge is creating the learning hours, guided learning hours, total qualification time.

Badges are an established standard we can lean on - integrate with things like LinkedIn.

Varying perspectives

CYF had a similar big discussion two years ago around who we’re taking and what our objectives are.

Had a lot of push-back from people who have been through the program - for a lot of people, their objectives weren’t primarily to get people into jobs. A number of people whose involvement is important have very different views on objectives.

Sally: If we’re telling people “Come to Code Your Future so you can get a job in tech”, we need to deliver on that, or change our messaging.

For people with low self-confidence, will we end up not pushing them enough? e.g. Will we end up channelling all of the women into more ancillary roles?

RainBird

Company who have offered to potentially give us some computing capacity to help with our interviewing/recruiting process.

Their person is going to let Liliana unload all of her thoughts about our interviewing process and see if/how they can help.

Action items

  • Chris to Write a brief for the “Add to Google Classroom” button from the Syllabus - rolling over to next week.
  • Ali: What do we teach and why?: Talk about why we don’t teach classes
  • Daniel: What do we teach and why?: Expand “what we don’t teach” a bit - pull out of table
  • Daniel: File ticket about pulling state earlier into the course.
  • Schedule a session next week so Greg + Mitch can join, and walk through the assorted artifacts.
  • Sally: To put together a single doc in one place for folks to give feedback.
  • Everyone: Put together feedback on Sally’s many produced pieces for next steps for high-level course redesigns, and specifics around badges.

04/08/2021

Present

Sally, Ali, Daniel, Greg, Chris

Minutes

  • Action Points from last meeting
    • Greg, MongoDB Ticket Write Up
      • Push back 1 month
    • Chris, Ticket plan for JS3 Proj
      • Done
    • Chris, Coursework Update thingy
      • Done
  • Tender
    • Has been submitted
    • We’ve aimed to have everything in there be good for CYF
    • Compromise on the length of the course
      • Max was 24 weeks
      • Now the course “officially” starts after JS3
    • Fundamentals convertion to a self-paced course
      • We’d lose
        • Students get know each other
        • Students getting to know mentors
        • 121 assessments
          • Was originally the core of the idea
        • Team building? Community?
        • CYF getting to know the students e.g. attendence, punctuality
        • The chance to remove people from the course
      • We’d gain
        • Less of an odd gap between Fundamentals and JS1
      • We want to gain
        • “I am a tiny god”
      • Would this become an Intro To Coding 2?
    • HTML/CSS/JS Combination & Reword
      • See Sally for Notes
    • How does JS1 and Fundamentals overlap?
      • Could we make better use of this time?
      • nb: functions - we teach twice and some (lots) of students still don’t get it
    • Separate pathways (this money comes from the tender)
      • Cyber - requires money and qulaificiations so may be lower priority
      • Product - currently doing adhoc.
  • Github Actions
    • Seem to be working well!
    • Just need more review on it
    • What happens if we want
  • Classroom API
    • Could we integrate it to the syllabus to automate posting
  • Live Code Blocks vs Codesandbox
    • Which do we want?
    • CSB is used in React
    • Leaning towards Codesandbox

Actions

  • Daniel - To do more work on Github Actions work
  • Chris - Write a brief for the “Add to Google Classroom” button from the Syllabus

2021-07-21

Present

Ali, Sally, Mitchell, Chris, Greg

Notes

  • Codility
    • Agreed on a few assessments, based on a few that Ali found
    • Waiting on the city coordinators to tell people about it, reduce the surprise
    • Sally got access to their tests repo, has downloaded a copy
      • We can use this as a basis for writing our own tests, and potentially move platforms if wanted
    • Integration with Google Classroom
      • Sally have been in talks with them about a number of things
      • Fairly unlikely
  • Crucial stages for giving feedback to trainees
    • End of JS2-1 - end of JS syntax
    • End of JS3 - end of JS in the browser
    • End of React - last point at which we can fork
  • Optional coursework
    • Marking optional coursework as “stretch” - Sally did this
    • Identifying most important coursework - this is a job for module gardener
  • Testing
    • Discussed in a follow up meeting. Actions:
      • Where are we?
        • Most of js1 and js2 done
        • A few outstanding PRs
      • JS3
        • How do we test the JS3 TV Show DOM Project
        • Filter/Search could be a nice standalone component
        • Can we reduce the amount of duplicated code that student write?
          • Students currently write one massive function
          • DRY?
      • React
        • Jest makes it quite easy to write tests for React
          • JSDom
          • React Testing Library
      • Actions
        • Give the TV Show project more framework so that it can be easier to test (e.g. Separate some business and dom logic)
        • Write Github Action for showing if the tests are passing on a students PRs
        • Write up issue about teaching require/import module dependencies
    • TV show project needs more work, so it’s easier to test
    • Should we test React, Node?
      • Need to figure out the testing frameworks etc for this
      • Trainees should probably be writing their own tests?
        • Might need lesson time to teach react-testing-library, etc
        • Possible this could be done in a coursework (written) lesson
    • ITC testing
      • Sally put together a test suite ITC projects: https://codepen.io/sallymcgrath/pen/PommVwg
      • Initial concerns about wall of red, but have some trainees signed up to test. We’ll see what happens
        • Assertions could be a bit more descriptive - ideal would be “tried to find X element in the DOM but could not find it”
  • Tech interview workshop
    • Ali gave some feedback, positive
      • There’s opportunities to talk about take-home tests - but probably can be tweaked to cover this
  • Funding source
    • They have changed the terms of the tender
      • Max course length of 24 weeks
      • Minimum of 100 learners
        • Possible to partner with others, but will only do this if we get something out of it
      • Have to be employed within 90 days
    • CYF won’t change our core demographic to keep the money
    • Reasons to do this
      • Diversify into cybersecurity & cloud
        • Lots of jobs in ops/IT admin roles - both in big & small companies
        • Understanding of security is important to get these roles
          • Challenges
            • We don’t have expertise in this
              • Can buy in a course, but we don’t have anyone to deliver it
            • Would have to find more volunteers - can spend some of the money to do this
              • Outreach - going to meetups etc
        • Another cybersecurity bootcamp: https://www.capslock.ac/
        • Potential starting point for cybersecurity knowledge: https://www.cybok.org/knowledgebase/
        • A lot of cloud roles require paid for certs (e.g. AWS, Microsoft)
          • Companies (e.g. Capgemini) may be willing to pay for the cert (after we’ve trained them up)
      • Possibility of a data science course
        • Challenges
          • Trainees need to be strong in maths
  • Github Sponsors
    • Sally signed us up for this
    • Got approved for it today! You can sponsor the syllabus!
  • Changes to template repo
    • Chris says there’s a way of pushing down changes to the parent template repo to all the “child” repos

Actions

  • Greg to write on the Mongo archive ticket all the things that need to be done
  • Chris to ticket the plan for changes to TV show project (and potentially other “free-form project”)
  • Chris to update the coursework template

2021-07-07

Present

Sally, Chris, Greg, Ali, Daniel, Philip Fol

Actions:

  • Everyone: Take a look at Codility, get a feel, form opinions.
  • Chris: Create a Codility test for the end of JS2 Week 1.
  • Think about what are our crucial stages for getting feedback on how trainees are doing.
  • Sally: Work out how to convey (probably to buddies, maybe more broadly too) that we teach somewhat functional programming, and accordingly don’t lean much into things like OOP.
  • Sally: Try to re-brand optional coursework exercises. Maybe as “stretch”, or maybe just re-designate them as all mandatory.
    • Sally: Also identify for buddles what the most important concept/exercise is the most important each week.
  • Chris: Arrange a separate testing-focused meeting. Some agenda items:
    • Module systems.
    • Do we want tests for React + Node + DBs?
    • GitHub Actions to run tests.
  • Review Chris’s PR
  • Take a look at Daniel’s draft tech interview workshop
  • Follow up with Codility to see if they can integrate with Google Classroom or similar for sending out assessments to groups.

Catch-up from last time

  • Continue TDD - on-going
  • Think about exit criteria

Membership

Welcome Philip Fol! Matthew will be stepping back for a bit.

Codility

We’re having a partnership with Codility - tech test platform (we’re pretty sure they’re giving it to us for free).

Codility is a system for screening out people who can’t code. Target is filtering away the people who can’t code from thousands of candidates. That isn’t exactly our aim.

Had a sales call - Sally has a recording if anyone’s interested, but it’s just a tour of the interface.

We got a bunch of trainees to do an “HTML Exit” test as an example.

Tracks time spent, requirements completeness. Can replay their test-taking step by step - mostly not needed, but can dig in when things go wrong.

They have an API for exporting details if we need.

Copying and pasting is allowed and works fine.

Positives

  • They have an API
  • They produce stats at scale
  • Can get a good at-a-glance view of how trainees are doing
  • Flexible on the backend, e.g. we could allow re-attempts, give more time, etc.

Downsides

  • Making a test depends on their pre-canned tests (split up by role) and/or libraries to build them up.
  • Most of the pre-canned stuff is probably better targeted at graduates than people during the course.
  • Blunt tool. Need to work out how to make it work for us and how to not just be more work for us.
  • Quality of pre-canned tests - Sally looked at 3 HTML tests - one 5-minute was set as a 40-minute test, one was fine, and one was just incorrect in its expectations.
  • Vendor lock-in.
  • The exercise taker can’t write their own tests - can only run the pre-supplied ones.
  • There’s no versioning in the tests.

How do you invite them to a challenge?

Manually by email in the interface, or by API. Can also create public links but they’re anonymous - struggle to track and get cohort information from it.

We could maybe ask them to integrate better with e.g. Google Classroom, but unlikely to get much traction.

What are our concerns RE false positives/negatives

Much more likely people will fail when they should pass than pass when they should fail.

Trainees could plausibly cheat pretty easily if they wanted to.

What stages would we use this for?

End of module assessments. Possibly entry criteria assessment for modules too.

Have an intense desire from cities to be able to see at a glance who needs extra support which isn’t a large complicated spreadsheet. Also a desire to not spend so much time doing rote marking and automate that as much as possible.

Goal is to de-emphasise time spent marking coursework - push the trainees to own their coursework experience, and rely on more formal/structured assessments for progress tracking.

Concerns

  • Vendor lock-in (Sally also has an account with https://www.qualified.io/ now)
  • Watch how much time we sink into the proof of concept.
  • How to introduce tests - if we spring them on people it’s surprising, if we warn them in advance it’s daunting.

How are tests written?

Three styles - kata-style, multiple choice, long-form written answer, and whiteboard coding style.

Do we want to tell the trainees their results?

Lots of down-sides to doing so:

  • For trainees lacking confidence getting a poor score even though they’ve done pretty well can knock confidence.
  • For trainees struggling, if they score really highly but it’s not representative, that’s a very hard conversation.

Next steps

  • Syllabus: Take a look, get a feel, form opinions. Maybe do this with a 15-minute in-class experience to avoid a large lead-time.
  • Work out our crucial stages for getting feedback on how trainees are doing.

Cohorts

Many people have been thinking in different ways about how we deal with the tension between having a cohort which forms a community, and being flexible around how long individuals take to learn things and advance.

On-boarding volunteers and buddies

Want to decentralise this a bit - make it less Sally’s job and more each city’s coordinator.

Differentiating factors between our trainees

Very clear that the trainees who don’t do the optional exercises don’t do well.

Part of that is probably because we don’t communicate how to get support well enough.

Why don’t we set all of our exercises as mandatory? Maybe we should…

We don’t have a great story for how to catch people up when they’re behind.

We need to make the modules more modular, and make better off-ramps.

We also need to work out how to bring the product people more into the fold of the syllabus - this is a big thorny problem!

9/6/21

Present

Chris, Ben, Mitchell, Sally, Greg

Welcome to Ben

Actions:

  • check in notes from last time and followup on any actions
  • @Chris to write up why students are struggling
  • @all create issue to tell them “do codewars” in the syllabus
  • Raise wider discussion of modularisation - how far do we want to take the concept.
  • @Greg bring up teaching unit testing for Glasgow
  • @Chris invite Kerim and Craig

Unit testing

  • Mitchell getting PR ready for unit testing

Proposed renaming/refocusing of Javascript

  • Sally - maybe should focus more on modularisation so that we can teach (inside module and across module) in whatever order
  • Mitchell - should we make explicit the dependencies/place other things earlier
  • (side discussion on scope: would like to bring it in early, groundwork can be laid in css)
  • Sally: could have teams that are module focused to “garden” the individual modules
    • syllabus team should figure out how to support people in doing this
  • Greg: As well as dependencies: document reasoning
    • Sally: would also be good to have better communciation/collaboration between modules
  • Ben: at school of code, similar issues - making things reorderable
  • Greg: concern that “Basics of Javascript” makes it a dumping ground for everything that is conceptually “basic”, even if we could delay teaching it

Boxtribute work-study internship

  • Chris has already pushed back on the technology list
  • Originally they wanted to set up a code school and Chris encouraged them to pay interns instead
  • Could we get clarification on how they intend to support students in the self-study
  • Some companies that offer similar programmes also pay a living wage
  • CYF probably shouldn’t be encouraging students to take positions that are poorly remunerated

Codewars

  • Sally has created a cyf collection https://www.codewars.com/users/CodeYourFuture/authored_collections
  • Graduates who are struggling have not been doing the suggested work
  • Very little mandatory code katas in the curriculum
  • Sally: by JS3, everyone should have level 6 (means completing 20 entry-level kata)
  • Could we introduce the principle of the a daily standup to be done by a slackbot
  • posting in the void might feel unfun (and seeing that other people don’t do it, so I don’t have to)
  • Would be good to demo that as part of the weekly class
  • Target 300 so that you can make your own kata (careful to not have them reviewed as trivial katas get ripped to shreds)
  • Kata: have some katas to deliberately revisit

Node re-ordering discussion thread

  • should have that conversation

3blue1brown

  • Mathematical animation engine
  • would be really cool to have something similar based on coding

Stratification in groups

  • should we find out the pros and cons? is it something to formalise?
  • more driven by necessity in London

26/05/2021

Attendance: Chris, Daniel, Greg, Mitch, Sally, Ali, Matt

Actions from Last Time

  • Daniel to put JS1 convert tests - done
  • Mitch write short npm intro
  • Sally to teach HTML module - Currently doing, made contact with Lucy in London, had same points as Sally
  • Chris to fix bug - Daniel has fixed bug
  • Promises, greg to explain more in JS3 - Chris has made a thread, no discussions made so far

Agenda Points

  • Ali’s syllabus link - Chris has fixed this already, could probably close all the tickets on it
  • Chris, non-mathsy codewars exercises - think that the codewars katas are good, not sure about including them within the syllabus or not, can make collections of katas by modules, collections are tied to an account but we can create a CYF account on codewars for this, need to be careful about adding more marking. Chris to add them in as optional coursework.
  • Hotel App - Could get more peer-review marking involved with optional challenges of react.
  • HTML/CSS Sally - Spent a lot of time defining terms. Could potentially be useful to add a glossary in for terms they are to cover on specific modules. Potential issue that if we create a glossary there is an assumption there that because its written down it doesn’t need to be taught. Flatiron html coursework was good but UI of website horrendous and very confusing for the students. Potential option to teach grid first, made teaching box difficult. Sally has made a set of notes, will feedback after finishing teaching. Potential issues surrounding semantic html, lack of understanding of when to use div tags and when not. Live debugging using dev tools was really good.

Jest

  • Are we requiring test or accepting globally
  • Are we going to run the tests through github actions? - issue that students might then only practice tests when they submit to git rather than testing locally
  • Just having pure pass fail might be useful for markers
  • Mitch happy to add a guide for CI output interpretation
  • We shouldn’t hide the logs for the students
  • No intention at this point to get the students to write the tests, it’s more about interpretation at this stage
  • First use case going to be NW4 in about two weeks

Github Actions

Sprint Planning

  • JS Core 1 Assessment - Matt to look at Chris’s comments
  • JS Core 1 Challenges - Added back into ready for development
  • React Week 2 - Ali still to work on this
  • Add Pre-Work for HTML/CSS - Chris assigned himself
  • Use uuids instead of ids for albumsData - Chris assigned himself
  • Get jest merged this week
  • Everybody to review the PR’s

12/05/2021

Attendance: Chris, Daniel, Greg, Mitch, Sally

Agenda

  • Tech test
  • TDD first steps
  • HTML/CSS content discussion
  • Trailing slash
  • Promises
  • Report from new Git lesson

Important Points raised

  • New person is joining team soon, hurray
  • Chris is eating amazingly vile sounding KFC flavoured crisps

We reviewed a tech test

  • Action: Chris to raise an issue to write up a tech test for our trainees.

TDD: Jest

We met with people from tech projects last week and agreed to use Jest.

  • Action: Daniel to put Jest in JS-1 and convert tests
  • Action: Mitch to write Jest overview
  • Action: Mitch to write short npm intro for JS-1 and update pre-reqs before NW4 start JS-1

HTML/CSS module

Sally links presentation on the DOM for HTML W1. Lots of work being done separately across cities. Can we combine our efforts?

  • Action: Sally to teach through module and identify missing pieces
  • Action: Sally to get marking guide/s from Lucy into the repo

Trailing slash

Trailing slash bug has been raised as top 10 things to fix. Please can a Javascript person take a look?

  • Action: Chris to raise an issue

Promises

Greg asks can we find a place in [JS-3] to explain promises. Daniel asks should we teach anything other than async await.

  • Action: Chris to raise a discussion point on this

New git

Mitch reports from teaching new git material. A success!

28/04/2021

Missing notes 😢

14/04/2021

  • Sally opened a PR for JS1 marking guide
  • Fundamentals
    • Why Processing.js?
      • Fast to get something tangible
        • It’s difficult with vanilla JS to make something “fun” (i.e. not printing text to a terminal). Processing makes it easy to code something interesting quickly
        • Trade-off: Processing is “magical”, and KA is particularly weird about it
      • “Flipped classroom”: sessions at the weekend were to unstick students, not necessarily to introduce new concepts
        • Hence need for a good online course
    • There’s a lack of documentation describing the above
      • Action: Sally to do write this up
    • Fundamentals was also originally designed to be a “taster session” for programming, as well as an intro to JS
      • Wouldn’t need lots of volunteer time on at the weekend, so online course is ideal
      • Could be run much more regularly during the year
  • React assessment
  • TDD

31/04/2021

Missing notes 😢

17/03/2021

Attendance: Ali, Chris, Daniel, Greg, Matthew, Sally

Agenda

  • Location for solutions to in-class exercises
  • new Choose Your Own Adventure exercise for JS3 W1
  • should we add a section about paths in JS?
  • MongoDB

Glasgow forking fundamentals

Chris: Following up on our Scotland meeting - we are forking the repo and we would like them to raise issues and get their improvements feeding back in. Hopefully I’ll invite them to come to these things again to have more of those kind of discussion.

Class exercises

Daniel: Antigone put together solutions for class exercises. How and where should we maintain these solutions? Chris suggests tabs. Sally suggests passwords.

Action items:

  • now: put the solutions in tabs
  • future: produce a react component to lock the solutions in future and provide the password after the appropriate lesson

CYA coursework

Ali: Everyone is happy. Ticket merged. Done!

Terminal lesson and Cowsay

https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/syllabus/pull/189 https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/syllabus/pull/166#issuecomment-770410775 Discussion: Should we learn paths earlier on? They are not a react concept. If we teach it too early they won’t retain it. We won’t do paths earlier, but we will do them more in JS3. Possibly put cowsay into JS3 and require a bunch of stuff?

Ali: I wonder if we could actually take pretty much that entire coursework and turn it into a lesson in the end of js3. Chris: This one I think we definitely need an issue for it and it is gonna be a slightly longer running piece of work.

Action items:

  • Write a paths cheat sheet, SOMEONE? Ali?
  • Dropped thread: cowsay lesson/expansion - Sally will chase this up

General discussion about iterating and increasing complexity in exercises.

Would it be interesting or annoying to recap some of the exercises from js1? But with objects, eg the transport one, which is, how can you get with different means of Transport between two cities? Just give them exactly the same exercise, but put the data in objects?

Action item:

Repeat some exercises from week 1 but this time with objects instead of arrays. Sally to make issue.

Action items:

  • Redo TV show project in React (with call back to earlier project)
  • Chris to contact Neil Bogie

MongoDB

https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/syllabus/discussions/192

  • Glasgow school got on well with Postgres
  • He proposes to write out a list of all the things he plans to do so it can be reviewed
  • Hopes to have this ready in 3 months
  • Discussion about mongoDB vs Postgres -

Action item:

Chris to speak to London teachers and see what they want to teach this year PostGres/Mongo

Assessments

https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/JavaScript-Core-2-Assessment/blob/main/scrabble.md

Snapshot assessment at JS2 proved very useful. Teachers want it for JS1 JS3, and React. The marking guide is the key part needed here.

Action items:

  • Daniel will work on JS3, Matthew will work on JS1. Two assessments of 15 mins each, with a rubric to guide marking.
  • Ali wrote an assessment for React, an open book assesment. Find it, update it, and add it.

Homework marking guide

We want to write marking guides for buddies. Each coursework should have one. It should cover: the object of the coursework, key points to look for, common mistakes, and how to respond.

Action items:

  • Chris is working on this.
  • Sally will review student submissions and find more patterns.

03/03/2021

Attendance: Daniel, Chris, Anthony, Sally, Greg, Matthew, Mariana, Kevin, Irina, Alastair

Agenda

  • Icebreaker (5 minutes)
  • Actions from last meeting (10 minutes)
  • Agenda Points (~30 minutes)
  • Sprint Planning (~30 minutes)
  • Fundamentals discussion
  • Are Github discussions worth it ?

Work In Progress

  • Functions-expressions PR now merged
  • Cowsay currently in progress courtesy of Sally
  • How to ask a good question
  • Chain of commits diagram
  • Encouraging live coding
  • Coursework solutions

Fundamentals discussion

  • Do we have established way for PD mentors to edit the syllabus ?
  • Fundamentals on GitBook - people can edit directly on there
  • PD changes should be run through Candy
  • Significant changes to the course by Aprill, need an easy to way to make changes for Scotland
  • Need to ensure not confusing for students which parts of the syllabus they need
  • What are the fundamental differences for Scotland ?
    • Much looser in Scotland
    • Not about assessment
    • More about a period of adjustment for students in Scotland
    • Use some of the ideas but not everything
    • E.g. A lot of PD tasks like giving presentations in the first week so very demanding
    • A lot of people not fully comfortable with their computer setup before starting the full course
  • Currently framed as an assessment period
  • Softer exit if students are told they can’t continue after the fundamentals section - better than asking students to stop continuing after JS-week-2
  • More an assessment of intent ( truly gauge if they’re prepared to work for 20 hours or so )
  • Fundamentals course shouldn’t be ability based - should be just a way of assessing attitude
  • Maybe update wording as students may find the wording scary “If you don’t do X then you may have to leave the course”
  • Harder to pick on people who are having difficulties with the course whilst working online
  • Confused whether we take 100 for fundamentals and then go down to 30 for the Full Stack
  • Change to fundamentals may be beneficial across the different cities ( Daniel )
  • Some people put on to the course as maybe ( in Manchester ) so assumed that some people are not going to make it on to the full stack bootcamp
  • Could take up to 2 months to know for sure if a student can make it through the course ( Irina )
  • Normally about 3/4 people towards the end of the course that are struggling with the course
  • May need a definition of the ideal student at Code Your Future i.e. do they have previous experience etc.
  • Generally positive about Kahn Academy - but some confusion over whether this is how you build websites
  • May need taught material for the Fundamentals section of the course

Actions

  • Re-structure PD elements and language used in the Fundamentals section
  • Raising issues for the Fundamentals repository

17/02/2021

Attendance: Daniel, Chris, Sally, Matthew, Ali, Greg

Welcome new members

  • Matthew
  • Sally

Updating the intro to coding course (/application process) (Chris)

  • No need to get involved, just being generally aware that this is happening.

  • Feedback comes from recent graduates/joiners

  • Tech side: easy for students to pass by just following steps (/googling freecodecamp tribute page)

  • Soft skills side: intro to coding course should represent the soft skills, so that it’s a good “sample” of what students can expect

  • Improving the tech skills

    • raise the upper level of how well students can do, by making a “challenge” approach.

  • Questions

    • Should actual coding be part of intro to coding?
    • Are the cutoffs during the acceptance process in line with what they’ve learned and with what we’re able to assess? (end of js1)
    • Could having some sass add coding fundamentals/some other version of programmatic thinking?
    • Long term intention of the fundamentals course was not really to do what we’re doing.

Action for Chris -> discussion of what is taught in fundamentals course (e.g sass)

What kinds of tech interviews do our students end up doing and what skills should they be practiced in going in (Chris)

  • Cap Gemini put a lot of soft skills to the front (even rejected some strong coders from Birmingham)
  • Got feedback from Cap Gemini hiring manager:
    • students did worst at selling their technical skills
    • very good at talking about their own experiences
    • very good at self directed learning
    • enthusiastic about learning new things
    • students tend to pigeon hole themselves (e.g. backend vs frontend)
    • students don’t have confidence that they could learn a new language/take their learning and re-produce it.
  • Question: does the final project affect students confidence in a negative way that we might want to address?
    • Would it be a good time to invite recent graduates?
    • Yes, it’s quite common for students to fill low in confidence
    • Lack of having things on github

Action for Chris -> speak to German about who we’re designing the syllabus for (who are the hirers, what skills are they asking for) Action for Chris -> chase up city coordinators to fill in the outcomes spreadsheet

JS Core 2 exercises (Ali)

  • Choose your own adventure
    • Goal: Getting students used to the existence of objects
    • Concern: it’s a bit different from what we’ve done in the class?
    • Comment: a bit like an internal DSL

Action for Chris: Get a Gist from Ali and give it to some students.

  • Suits of cards
    • More standard
    • Can we make it more difficult/complex (Ali: assertions become tricky)

Git branch (Daniel)

  • Seeking feedback

  • Planning to record feedback?

  • Git bracken?

  • Git prettyfier? (could then use asciicinema)

Sprint planning (Chris)

  • Git ticket almost ready
  • introducing funtions, ready for review
  • js excercises 2

New tickets

  • Encouraging live coding?
  • Cowsay? Sally could pick up
  • Git diagrams? Daniel
  • How to ask a good question -> maybe good for Atanas

Action for Chris, approach people about pairing up with Greg to get started on Mongo

03/02/2021

Present: Chris, Ali, Daniel, Mitch, Greg

Interview Prep Workshop

  • Ali & Daniel got chatting on PR about interview prep
  • What kind of companies are we targeting for trainees?
    • “Upper bound” of companies
    • Type of company
  • There are several kinds of tech interview
  • Do we prepare trainees for all types of interview?
  • Discussion of specific example of LazyFlatIterator
    • Problem is very abstract, which we think would throw a lot of trainees
  • Is it realistic to expect trainees to get jobs at FAANG/top companies?
    • We think the majority of student’s wouldn’t pass the interview
    • Self-fulfilling strategy - if we prepared trainees for this, would they get it?
  • We could prepare for what kind of things a tech interview, but without looking at specific kinds of problems (e.g. computer science-y problems)
    • E.g. explain thinking out loud
    • Think about performance of solutions
  • Potentially involve Anahita - London PD
    • Tech recruiter for Capgemini
    • Has expressed interest in developing content in this domain
  • Daniel opened a ticket to discuss a workshop
  • Action points
    • Chris to speak to Capgemini
    • Chris to decide what types of companies we are aiming for
    • Syllabus team to read ticket & discuss

When do we release solutions to coursework?

  • London were releasing the week after
    • Concern is that they could put in minimal effort to solve, then get solution without putting work in
  • Releasing answers helps buddies since the answers are available, but it also means enforcing putting in effort
  • Trainee who is putting in effort, but sees answers then thinks that they understand it, but without actually
  • Suggestion
    • Release by default
    • But if Edu Buddy notices that trainee is coasting, the it can be flagged to City Coordinator
    • Can then restrict that trainee from getting the answers (by not inviting them to the private answers repo)
  • Action points
    • Chris to write this up as policy for Edu buddies

Team changes

  • Tim taking some time off (too much going on)
  • Few new people joining in the next few weeks

Git CLI/Terminal

  • Terminal lesson went out to London students
    • 12 students completed. No problems, but they are likely best students, so waiting to see how it goes for other students
  • Git
    • Daniel working on it, roughly ready to go
    • PRs incoming
    • Diagrams are still TODO

20/01/2021

Present: Chris, Bukola, Mitch, Ali, Daniel, Greg, Lucy

HTML & CSS discussion - led by Lucy

  • Atannas has raised several questions regarding the syllabus
  • Syllabus doesn’t currently start from scratch with HTML & CSS
  • Always have disparate level of abilities and knowledge with any class

Week 1

  • Lucy’s learning objectives:
    • Week-1
    • Starts with a summary of the learning objectives
    • How to attach CSS to a HTML document
    • Discuss CSS specificity
    • Write simple HTML and CSS pairings
    • Discuss the box model in CSS
  • Avoid git issues and sandboxes
  • Lots of interactive exercises throughout the lesson
  • For homework build a website using some Figma designs
  • Trainees can find extension tasks at Frontend Mentor
  • Currently still using the bikes for refugees project over the HTML and CSS section
  • Lucy is using smaller layout exercises for this section
  • Try and get students to fork and clone the homework before the end of the class

Week 2

  • Week 2 deals with responsive design, media queries
  • Homework for week 2 is to add a media query to existing Karma Project for a mobile design
  • More sandbox activities for manipulating the UI with media queries
  • Trainees given a wireframe for a cake website with a mobile view and a desktop view

Week 3

  • Start with a lot of repetitive stuff in CSS

  • Introduce the need for classes in order to reuse CSS rules

  • Then introduce a CSS framework like Bootstrap - there to solve the problem of consistency

  • Give students some understanding of columns

  • Issues with Bootstrap:

    • Comes with clutter like utility CSS etc
    • Also comes with a lot of JS components
    • Can sometimes be a little chaotic
    • Sometimes distracted by Bootstrap features

  • Lucy has made a separate CSS framework “Simple Grid” for Code Your Future - just for columns ( no JS components and grid etc )

  • Downside is that Bootstrap has loads of documentation and examples online so maybe more difficult for students to figure stuff out

  • Homework for week 3 used Wix templates in the past - needs to change for copyright reaons

  • May need an additional 4th class

  • Syllabus is opinionated - but with flexibility built into it so people can choose to teach something in particular should they choose to do so

  • Potentially focus on Bootstrap but if you want to use “Simple Grid” then you can if you want

  • Syllabus there to define which concepts need to be understood and which skills need to be acquired but not to prescribe the particular resources used to achieve the skills / resources

Cloud development - led by Bukola

  • Would like to introduce cloud development in the syllabus at some point
  • Could introduce deployment / automation especially when students encounter Netlify and there is a need for deployment
  • Github CLI is a good starting point for this
  • Make use of Bukola’s notes for this topic
  • Good turn this into an optional workshop
  • Cloud infrastructure is the number one skill employers are after
  • We could also have a postgraduate module for teaching students stuff after the course ( post graduation )
  • Could introduce bonus material from early on so that the students are primed for the introduction of cloud stuff later on
  • Is there scope for something like Lambda functions around the time of React to bridge with NodeJS
  • Netlify uses a CLI tool for deployment of cloud functions

Further actions

  • Setup a future discussion further down the line re cloud workshop / module
  • Establish learning objectives for a cloud workshop / module
  • Setup a cyf-syllabus-cloud channel

06/01/2021

In Attendance: Daniel, Chris, Greg, Tim, Mitch, Ali

Personal Development Syllabus

  • https://personal-development.codeyourfuture.io/
  • Technical Interview might be missing
    • Can this be rolled into the PD Syllabus?
  • Could we add more time CV Workshops
  • “Asking Good Questions” is a section that could be pulled out earlier and more in depth
    • Has been included in Day 3 so can be pushed more around
  • We should be aiming to interleave the content between the two Syllabus'
  • “Imposter Syndrome” could be covered
    • You’re not meant to understand everything

Action: All Attendees - To review the content in more details

UseContext Discussion

  • Greg recently learnt React to help TA a class
    • He discovered UseContext that could be used in place of Redux
  • Ali - We can use the “Extra Lessons” to contain this
  • Ali - We’ve always not included it as part of the course as it isn’t required for most of what the students are trying to do
  • Could this be included into the Post Graduate section of the course?

Action: Greg to investigate how they could be implemented and included

Instructional Design Class

  • Greg used to work in this area and knows people who want “clients” to work with
  • Might be able to help us craft a pedagogically good workshop or help with HTML/CSS Module

Action: Greg to refer them to me

Round Table

  • Chris to prepare a plan for a Round Table discussion with lots of different stack holders of the

Action: Chris to write up plan and poll for the best time for the Round Table

Lucy and HTML/CSS

  • Lucy Zidour is an experience CYF Teacher from London who has historically taught HTML/CSS
  • She has good tested material that could do with being folded into the Syllabus
  • Lucy will attend our next meeting to discuss

Git & Terminal

  • As part of a roll-out of a better way to teach Git we need to start thinking about how to teach further Git Theory and the Terminal in preparation for React
  • We should start working on this soon

Action: Chris to prepare meeting on this for next week

09/12/2020

In Attendance: Chris Owen, Ali Smith, Mitchell Lloyd, Tim Hamrouge

Functions

Minutes from the call on 7th Dec.

Chris overall happy with it. Flagged that the coursework needing to be checked that trainees don’t see content out-of-order.

Also had discussion of timings of lesson 1. Concern about fitting in good naming content, but pointed out that this can be covered in variables section earlier. Assigned some rough timings for AM/PM content in week 1.

Next steps:

  • Suggested that start learning objectives first
  • Then write exercises that fulfill the LOs
  • And then fill out content

Code style guide

Ali has started writing it up, but not lots of progress yet.

JS Core 2 Exercises

Tim demoed some of the exercises so far. Progress looks good.

Typing tips/test for Intro to Coding

Ali wrote up a quick guide, but wasn’t sure what to do with it. Decided to write up a ticket for the board for Syllabus Team to discuss how to integrate into ItC.

25/11/2020

In Attendance: Ali Smith, Chris Owen, Daniel Wagner-Hall, Greg Dyke, Tim Hamrouge

Style guide

Discussing https://github.com/CodeYourFuture/syllabus/issues/105#issuecomment-731769854

General consensus supporting Ali’s comment. Important that learners understand the why (e.g. around indentation and naming), and in what Prettier does (particular that Prettier will reformat things to avoid surprising changes), less important to understand things like “how many spaces are correct”. We should make sure TAs (particularly when marking homework) know what to expect, and what things are worth highlighting in review. We should also consider what things we encourage all volunteers (particularly teachers & TAs) to do, e.g. should we try to get people to always add semicolons after statements? We should make sure to proactively re-format homework before setting it, so that they don’t submit huge whitespace diffs.

For React and beyond: Rely on default ESLint that comes from create-react-app.

We’ve had incidents in the Backend/Mongo course where client-side and server-side code were using different formatters with different spaces, which caused some issues. We should unify where they conflict.

Best practices docs: We should have some. Should probably set reading these as homework, rather than in-course, and will also be useful to be able to link to from PRs.

Try to avoid per-module advice in this doc - we should create per-module cheatsheets/similar where they’re needed, but don’t want to glom it all into one doc. These could also be useful to get teachers for later modules familiar with conventions that were taught in earlier modules (e.g. how much do we care about == vs === of if (blah) vs if (blah === undefined)).

Can easily get ESLint installed into VS Code, but ESLint rules are harder because they’re generally installed as npm packages. Could maybe bundle them in our own extension if we wanted. .eslint files in the CYF-Coursework-Template could fill this niche.

Ali will move forwards.

How we teach functions

No one seems to teach functions well.

Coding Train does a good job because he makes a distinction between functions that do things, and functions that return data, but we can’t use it directly because it uses p5.js which is very specific. Covering functions which both return things and have side-effects is maybe important too.

Everyone treats “and you can store the result in a variable” as obvious. Haven’t really seen how to teach “some returned value are ignored” much either.

How/when do we teach expressions? Week 2 of JS1 (functions are Week 1 of JS) - students have typically struggled with this.

Learners often struggle with map vs forEach. We struggled when we moved away from for loops, have moved a bit closer to for to help the learners understand the basics, but still need to cover map et al by the time we get to React.

Our examples aren’t places where functions aren’t actually useful (e.g. a sum function) - hopefully we can reframe into something more realistic as a motivating example.

Mitch is probably going to be away for a bit, so Chris will take it over and start gathering opinions this sprint.

This sprint

SQL

Pretty much everyone except London teaches MongoDB. Glasgow and Manchester have some SQL experts, and Birmingham fell through some cracks of undocumented prep work from having not run the course before.

Why does ~everyone teach SQL except London?

Partially because of domain knowledge in the particular cities. Partially lack of clarity around what’s more valuable to focus on.

Birmingham want to move from Postgres to MySQL. We should work out what to support… We should find out why Birmingham want to switch. It may be because they had a bad experience from the first class, but we should find out for sure. Maybe we could just have them connect to pre-running SQL servers, and not need to worry about which flavour of SQL they’re using. For Mongo, we don’t have them run anything locally, just use a hosted MongoDB.

JS2-2 coursework

When we introduce the DOM, there’s not much homework. Could do with someone reading over it and evaluate whether the coursework meets the learning objectives. The jump after this week is to a big project.

Tim will pick up.

AOB

Chris is taking most of December off (enjoy!). Will still check in to the meeting on December 9th, but won’t be picking up work.

We should do an idea generation session, with many attendees, to work out what else folks would like the syllabus team to prioritise, to fill in a backlog.

28/10/2020

In Attendance: Ali Smith, Chris Owen, Daniel Wagner-Hall, Tim Hamrouge, Carlos from Migracode

CARLOS FROM MIGRACODE

Welcome to Carlos from Migracode who use our syllabus for their course in Spain.

  • Carlos answered questions and gave some insight into Migracode.
    • Migracode have been around for 1 year. They were using our syllabus from then to teach with until April when Carlos started updating their syllabus with our new content.
    • Migracode began with one class, then another two in March and started three more in July. The classes consist of ~12 people.
    • The feedback from Spain is that our syllabus is great because of how up to date it is - particularly the content on React hooks.
    • They have split their classes out into smaller groups to enable them to give students more attention. They also have 1 Spanish class and 1 English class because a lot fo their students are from South America, but they do not translate the syllabus, the teacher does that while teaching.
    • They offer free English lessons to students. They are able to do this by using trainee teachers who can use the teaching time as credit for their courses.

GIT LESSON

  • Chris thanked all those who had worked on the content for the Git lesson.
    • Chris introduced the lesson content to the Birmingham team and it was well received, the lesson will be run by them for the first time on 31/10/20.

AOB

  • Chris needs some eyes on some PRs. Tim said he would take a look.
  • Ali asked for some resources on ‘How to ask good questions’ and ‘How to give good answers’. Ali will write a ticket for this.

14/10/2020

In Attendance: Ali Smith, Chris Owen, Greg Dyke, Daniel Wagner-Hall, Tim Hamrouge, Neill Bogie, Mike Hayden,

GIT & COMMAND LINE V. GITHUB DESKTOP

Discussion around wether to teach GIT & COMMAND LINE (G&CL) or GITHUB DESKTOP (GHD)

  • No final decision was made in the meeting about which technology should be taught.
    • It was agreed that in order to teach anything with Git comprehensively, more teachning time would be needed. Chris said that the 2 hours used to teach the topic could be spread out to 4.
    • There much discussion about multiple lessons on Git, in order to reduce the cognitive load and increase familiarity for stuents. Chris said that while additional lessons cannot be added, additional reources (as homework etc.) can be included.
    • Daniel and Ali agreed to work on the Git lesson plan for 31/10/2020.

STUDENT FEEDBACK FORM

  • Chris has created a Pull Request for a new feedback form to give to students at the end of lessons.
    • There was consensus that the form was a good idea, and would be added to the syllabus. It is a substantial change because it will affect all lessons.
    • Ali suggested an additional ‘Anything Else?’ field to capture intangible feedback, Chris Agreed.
    • Neill pointed out it must be made clear to students who can see their answers and how they will be used, all agreed.
  • ACTION: Chris to check form feedback in 1 month.