Welcome to the course :)
There are a lot of wonderful people who are dedicated to creating and maintaining educational resources. We curate and supplement those resources. Basically what that means is:
We’ll start off by introducing you to Github - it’s a really useful tool for all sorts of technical people and knowing how it works will serve you well. The first goal we have is just to get you familiar with how you can use Github to submit your projects.
We don’t want to overwhelm you by making you learn too many new things all at the same time so your first project will ask you to answer some questions about yourself, and upload the answers to Github.
Next up we’ll be getting into some code. We’ll introduce you to some good resources for learning foundational coding skills. Please don’t rush through the materials, focus on understanding as much as you possible!
One big difference between a good programmer and a bad programmer is understanding. If you ever want to build a career on these skills you really need to focus on understanding.
Lastly, we’ll be asking you to write some code :) We’ll give you a few small challenges that focus on very foundational skills.
When you submit your code we’ll test it and see if it works as it is meant to. We’ll let you know if you got it right or not.
If you got it wrong then you can try again :) You can try again as many times as you like, we’ll keep on giving you feedback.
Firstly, grit matters. If you are willing to try and try again until you get it right then that’s awesome. People willing to pick themselves up and keep going when things get hard are likely to succeed in life.
Secondly, because we try to make learning resemble real work as much as possible. Coders get things wrong all the time, they are always needing to revisit their work, fix it and improve it. Nobody gets everything right on the first try. If we expected you to be perfect that would be a bit silly. We just hope that you’ll try hard to learn from any mistakes.
It is our sincere hope that everyone who takes part in this program benefits: We want everyone to have an opportunity to learn some skills and to learn a bit about themselves.