been playing mario kart on my tamagotchi
Hey everyone! Chilling at a little cafe right now. Got a cappuccino and a cheese danish.
So, we’re working on _buildspace now and a lot of folks have asked me about why we pivoted away from ZipSchool. I’ll answer that question with a screenshot from our investor update below:
So, that’s that. It’s bittersweet. But, the future is looking quite bright.
Learning by doing.
_buildspace is an idea that’s been floating in my head in different forms for the last five years. It really centers around this idea that we learn best by doing. This is a pretty common belief. But, it isn’t really practiced much in the real world.
I can watch videos on how to bake chocolate chip cookies all day long but nothing will give me the learnings I’d have if I actually just went to bake those cookies myself.
The real world is imperfect and full of problems. Understanding these problems and how to work around them / solve them is where a learner has some of their deepest learnings.
Back in 2019 I was teaching this 12-year-old how to deploy his Minecraft website to Heroku. And, man, we ran into so many random problems. First, we didn’t set the port properly. So we did that. Then the CSS file wasn’t being picked up properly from the directory so we fixed that. Then the heroku-cli wasn’t being picked up on our path so we fixed that.
By the end, this kid understood at a deep level how to deploy his website because he actually did it and he deployed something that he and his friends were going to actually use. That last part is important. It’s what carries the learner past the finish line. If you don’t care about the thing you’re building, why would you finish it?
I was talking a CS student the other day and he said one of his classes went like: “lets learn some theory, then let’s scope out the architecture of this pretend food delivery app, let’s build certain pieces of it using the theory we learned, and by the end you’ll have a thing that you might kinda sorta care about that’s not even useful, and you can’t even put it on a portfolio because it’s not actually shipped to prod”.
The core idea here is okay. You’re learning by doing. But, it’s all in this weird pretend world. Worst of all, the student usually doesn’t even care about the pretend world the course has created for them nor the end product that much and can’t even show it to potential employers. So, motivation quickly becomes an issue.
What if the program focused around building?
Onwards
So far we 800 devs in our Discord, and over 500 enrollments for our courses starting this week.
We have two projects with enrollments open right now where you can learn by doing. Each project is 2-weeks long and revolves around a customizable thing you’ll actually ship to prod by the end and actually use + make your own.
Two 40-min live sessions per week led by your instructor. These are sessions where you can sit back, relax, and just learn by watching your instructor code stuff up + run demos.
Keep track of project progress on our web app. This is where you’ll do the hard work individually once you’ve gotten some clarity from the live sessions on how to attack the project.
Reach out to your instructor and TA at any time with questions. We’re just a DM away.
Join a community of devs to keep you accountable + to share memes with. These are other devs working on the same project you’re working on.
Solidity and Ethereum Smart Contracts, starting this week Thursdays at 8:30PM Eastern and Saturdays at 3:30PM Eastern.
https://buildspace.so/solidity
NextJS and APIs, starting this week Mondays and Thursdays at 7PM Eastern.