One Month, Thinkful present online programming courses with Hopscotch
NEW YORK–Last September 2, General Assembly held a talk featuring three companies offering online coding courses, One Month, Thinkful and Hopscotch at its offices in the Flatiron District.
https://generalassemb.ly/education/extra-credit-meetup/new-york-city/16481
Chris Castiglione, co-founder of One Month, the Y Combinator-backed learning platform, talked about how One Month is precisely that—it helps anyone learn any of its technology-based online courses in one month. These are online tutorials in Ruby on Rails, HTL, CSS, Growth Hacking, iOS and Programming for Non-Programmers.
Castiglione said it has more than 25,000 students, including employees from various companies. “We have students build (something) from day 1. By day 5, you have something you can upload on Github or Heroku,” he said. “If you don’t know what that means, you’ll know.”
While bootcamps preach total immersion, One Month lets learners take their time—15 minutes a day for 30 days, all online. “We have our own style compared to other courses out there. We are a school, not a library like Lynda.
One Month builds a course in 3 to 4 months and offers it for $49 a month.
Dan Friedman, co-founder of Thinkful, spoke next, took the opportunity to announce new educational offerings on its site. Tonight, it will start offering a library of online courses at $99 a month and in the following week, it will feature graduates of its programs.
Founded three years ago, Thinkful raised $4.5 million in a new round of funding last January, which is aimed at expanding its educational offerings online.
Unlike bootcamp classes which can set you back by a whopping $15,000, Thinkful offers a more affordable solution to learning starting at $300 to $1000 a month. One is paired with a mentor in a real-time online learning system or what Friedman calls the “magic of one-on-one plus the flexibility of online,” inspired as the company was on the one-on-one mentoring study by Benjamin Bloom.
What type of student do they get? “They go to us after they go to Codecademy,” he said. They get students paid for by the companies they work for, as part of their corporate training.
Next presenter was Samantha John, co-founder of Hopscotch, the iPad app that teaches kids how to create an app. Launched 2 years ago, it reportedly has 2.5 million downloads. “There’s no typing, no tricky syntax, just drag blocks of code with your fingers and play what you make instantly,” she said.
It ended up being used a lot in classrooms, she added.
