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It's Summer. Schools are on holiday or nearly there. Time for a quick update on what's been happening at codetoday as we enter into summer mode!
There's plenty to talk about, from the summer programme of Live Online Python courses for children, our new Higher Level courses, current and future plans for helping adults learn to code, and more.
Let's get started.
Summer Programme of Python Courses
Summer 2021 will see our busiest summer programme ever. Starting from the 20th of July, we have courses running every week throughout summer.
We want children to enjoy the summer and be out and about as much as possible to make up for the time they spent indoors in the past year and a bit. For this reason, all our sessions are just one hour per day. Each Live Online course runs over four consecutive days, with a one hour live session each day.
And as always with our Live Online Coding in Python courses, there's much more to the course beyond the live sessions. Each course includes:
Four interactive live sessions with our experienced, UK-based instructors
Additional videos and notes on our online learning platform to summarise and consolidate what students learn in the live sessions
Access to the Codetoday Community—a private forum for our students where they can come and ask us questions as they practise their coding independently after the live sessions. They can get help and feecback from our team of instructors in between sessions and after the course has ended.
We look forward to meeting many old and new students over the summer months!
Higher Level Courses for 7-16 year olds
Having launched the Live Online programme in March last year, we have been adding more and more levels to our main pathway that goes from Level 1 to Level 6 for all three of our age groups, 7-9, 10-12, and 13-16 year olds.
This summer we're also introducing a new set of courses, our Higher Level courses. These are courses aimed for those students who have already done Levels 1-6 with codetoday. They focus on specific themes and include topics relating to more advanced areas of Python programming as well as themes linked to other subjects, such as Science and Maths.
These Higher Level courses help students learn more advanded material and work on more complex projects, and they also help make links between coding and other subjects and areas.
WFH vs WFO
As every other business in most of the world, codetoday staff have been working from home (WFH) for over a year now. It has been a challenge in some ways, however, as a company we already had many tools and structures that allow us to communicate and work collaboratively in an efficient way. So the transition wasn't too bad.
We always operated with a flexible approach on how and when people work at codetoday, with the exception of teaching, of course, when we expect our instructors to be on time for their teaching!
Over the past year, we also changed how we recruit our instructors and now we have instructors from all across the UK and not just from London. Our commitment to the Live Online format of courses is long-term and not just as a 2020 temporary fix. Our new structure and cohort of instructors reflects this.
Although our core staff remain largely London-based, moving forward we will be keeping a hybrid option where most staff will keep WFH for most of the time, although we'll have some office days to facilitate the kind of work where face-to-face interaction is needed.
This means that our hiring for other non-teaching posts will also be open to prospective staff members who are based across the UK, not just in London. This will allow us to employ the best talent from across the whole of the UK.
New Coding for Adults Resources and Courses
We have plenty of exciting new projects in the pipeline for later in 2021 and 2022. We have started releasing one of these projects. This is our new stack of resources for adults who want to start to learn to code.
Throughout the 2020/21 pandemic, we carried on running our corporate training programmes as normal, but we paused the standalone courses for adults. This gave us an opportunity to work on a new stack of resources and courses that will provide even better support for adults who want to learn to code. We have also designed our stack to be as flexible as possible so that different learners can pick and choose whichever resources work best for them.
The full stack of resources will include several components. The first two of these have now been released:
The Python Coding Book is a freely available online textbook aimed for beginners. Part 1 is suitable for anyone who wants to learn to code. Part 2 is designed for those who want to use Python for quantitative applications such as those in science, finance, data analysis, and other fields that rely on heavily on data. Unlike other textbooks for beginners, The Python Coding Book focuses on clarity right from the start, keeping in mind that nothing is 'obvious' for a beginner. The text explains why things are the way they are, and not just how to do things.
The Codetoday Forum is, as the name suggests, a forum for those learning to code using The Python Coding Book, and all other future codetoday resources. Members of the Forum can come and ask questions and interact with the codetoday team and other learners. When learning any subject, especially coding, being able to ask a question in a friendly environment that's not intimidating is crucial to learning. The Codetoday Forum provides such an environment. At the moment, as we are gradually launching our stack of resources and courses, access to the Forum is free for anyone using The Python Coding Book.
Coming later on in the year is a range of video courses and live courses and workshops. If you'd like to keep updated on the resources and courses aimed for adults, simply sign-up using the link at the bottom of The Python Coding Book pages.
Other News
Codetoday is a finalist in the Club Hub Awards in the Biggest Growth of the Year category. Fingers crossed!
Our Founder and Director of Studies, Dr Stephen Gruppetta, is now one of the regular authors on one of the world's leading Python sites Real Python. His first two articles are aimed at intermediate learners who are looking at using some of the tools used in quantititive programming. One discusses how to use np.linspace from the NumPy module, and the other how to use plt.scatter from the Matplotlib module. The third and fourth articles are aimed more for beginners. These will be out on the 3 August and a bit later on in August.
Two of our long term students who have reached an advanced stage in their Python coding knowledge are doing an internship with us this summer, helping to write code that will be used to run our internal operations here at codetoday. It's great to see two students who came through the codetoday ranks who are now contributing to a real life project!
Please do contact us with any questions you may have. We're always happy to speak to members of our community and to help in any way we can!
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