There’s no low crawling in the mud under barbed wire here. But the pace of this website developer boot camp can be just as challenging.
Nine Shiprock High School students attended an eight-week full stack website development course over the summer—taught by Cultivating Coders, an Albuquerque-based company—in the school’s library.
“We’re actually going a lot faster than we should be, but it’s actually easy. It’s like learning another language,” junior Amber Henderson said in a June 28, 2016 interview about the six computer programs being taught. “This benefits us. Who would not want to hire someone who knows (website) code and works with the computer? It’s like a profession we will have.”
The course—free to the students—included receiving a free laptop and coding software to use. The students can continue to use their laptops throughout high school and college, and into their careers. They met eight hours a day, five days a week, over the months of June and July 2016.
“The course kind of benefited me on how to learn the website and learning the language. I always wanted to understand how a website works and how to build my own website,” said junior Alan Taliman, adding, “I did not have much of a background. I used to go on my computer and go on tutorials.”
The students are learning six computer-language coding programs, and website design applications, in a real-world corporate pace—that moves faster than a university—because it is taught in eight weeks, said Cultivating Coders’ co-owner and lead instructor Charles Sandidge, one of three instructors teaching the course at Shiprock High.
“Each (computer) language has its own purpose and does its own thing in the full stack,” Sandidge said, adding he worked in computer science when he was in the Navy, and tied the concept of teaching a website developer course to the immersion-style training given in a boot camp.
“So we want them to be fairly proficient in each one of those languages—to have a good base of the full stack. When they’re done they will be able to produce very clean well-designed websites and applications that have kind of a higher function,” Sandidge said, adding, “We learn a lot of tools. There’s lots of nuances to programming languages, just like learning a foreign language.”
The Cultivating Coders boot camp was made possible through Shiprock High’s partnership with Teach for America—which provided more than $30,000, and the U.S. Department of Education’s federal grant program GEAR UP (Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs), which provided more than $10,000, said Shiprock High’s Jeff Sagor.
“Those nine students are going to leave this program with an expertise as junior web developers. They will have mastered what’s called a full stack in coding language, which is the ability to develop both the front-end, the visual aspects of the website, and the back-end, the intricate codes,” Sagor said.
“They can graduate from Shiprock High School, and if they choose, get a job as a web developer, which is an economically sustainable career,” he added.
Originally published on June 29, 2016