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The nine-to-five experience that will change your life
Our classroom setting will be located in the vibrant downtown Sioux Falls, SD with an open-door policy so our community can be part of our experience. Today we are going to cover a typical day at Code Bootcamp. Each day is meticulously prepared to build on your knowledge and experience.
We fill each week with four full days of face-to-face classroom time, with Friday set aside as “Project Day” — we’ll cover that in a minute. Each day starts at 9am sharp, but we encourage everyone to come at 8am to get prepared for the day by reviewing any issues that you may have from the previous day’s lecture or project work.
Morning
At 9am, we begin the day by working on your proper lifestyle experiences which includes stretching, light exercise, healthy eating, and proper caffeine management. Building in the proper work-life balance every day helps build the right habits for a lifetime of screen-time writing code.
After our lifestyle section — which might include a brisk walk around the block — we jump right into a classroom-style lecture until noon. Sounds boring, doesn’t it? Unlike a traditional lecture, these are interactive lectures where we cover the day’s lesson through a combination of lecture, hands-on activities, and group projects. Since our class sizes will never exceed 15 students, we can bring that one-on-one experience to each student, not just those who fall behind.
Lunch-time
Each day we will break for a one-hour lunch; students can bring a lunch or partake of any one of our great downtown Sioux Falls restaurants. During lunch, the classroom will remain open for those who want to stick around and work on projects, conduct one-on-one sessions, or socialize.
About once a week we will have a catered lunch along with a guest speaker from our community. Our speakers will not be someone talking about themselves but rather them selling their business to you, the students. After all, it is just as much an opportunity for them to build a bond with each student as it is for students to make the best choices in where you want to spend the majority of life after they graduate.
Afternoon
Our afternoons will consist of specialized lectures which will dive deeper into topics covered in the morning. But unlike the morning sessions, each afternoon will be spent using these skills and applying them directly to real-world projects that our team will be building.
About those projects: we are not rebuilding a “yet-another-blog-platform” or other busywork which will never see the light of day. We will actually be working on real-world development projects that are commissioned by our sponsors and community. Projects will range from building a new website for a non-profit to helping a start-up business build their minimally-viable-product to a traditional outsourced project from a sponsoring business. Projects are hand-selected by our Board and worked on as a team to build the necessary real-world experience that is often missing from other programs.
Fridays will be dedicated to a day of project work. Unlike our afternoon projects, each student can bring their own project (for themselves or a paid project for others) to work on. This allows everyone to do work in an environment where they can get as much assistance as necessary from the staff and other students while they build their trait.
Evenings & Weekends
Class will be wrapped up for the day at 5pm but the doors won’t necessarily close! Throughout our eight weeks we will schedule various community meet-ups, socials, and other networking opportunities to allow students to network with our sponsors, business leaders, and community. Sioux Falls has many networking events which take place each week and we will introduce our students to those events as well. One of our goals is to help you build a strong professional network and this is part of that plan.
There are no classes over the weekend — work-life balance is an important skill for developers to learn and live by. In addition to no classes on the weekend, there is no homework either. Students are expected to keep up the lessons and may be required to catch up on their own time, but we have enough time each day that everyone should be able to keep up with the team.
Code Bootcamp is sponsored by:
I would love to hear from you about Code Bootcamp or see you attend our first session in May 2015. Please send me a Tweet at @wbushee, or drop me an email. After all, shouldn’t we all keep learning?
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