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Curriculum Philosophy and Code of Conduct

simon edited this page Dec 1, 2020 · 4 revisions

This describes the overall premise of a group of folks wanting to review the curriculum for Ada Developer Academy's core program.

This committee should be a group of individuals from different backgrounds committed to the quality and practicality of this curriculum, the program it supports (Ada Developer Academy's core program), and the mission it supports.

Code of Conduct

We operate with a Code of Conduct based on the Contributor Covenant v2.0.

Extending our CoC, we also explicitly prioritize the voices of underrepresented people in tech, and their contributions, suggestions, feedback, comments, safety, health, and well-being in this committee.

Curriculum Philosophy

Work done through the Core Curriculum Review Committee should reflect the mission, values, guides, rules, patterns, and alignment outlined in the rest of the core wiki.

The high-level learning goals for this curriculum are to gain skills in how to...

  1. Learn how to learn
  2. Write Code
  3. Debug Code
  4. Communicate About Code
  5. Practice practical career preparation
  6. Build an inclusive tech community

Our curriculum is... / When we develop curriculum, we want it to be...

  • Accessible
  • Fun
  • Every topic has clear relevance to a bigger topic or goal
  • Self-sufficient as a document
  • Empowering, respectful, and gentle
  • Collaboratively and democratically developed

Something to explicitly name is that the learning goals for the curriculum has currently largely been determined through a combination of research with alum, company partners, educators, hiring managers, and other curricula. Suggestions for topics to teach is discouraged.

Our curriculum vision is to describe our curriculum as...

  • "Captures not only facts about programming, but deeper thinking"
  • "This program paves the way for structural change"
  • "... Transformed lives and families, giving tools to help people be financially stable."

Our attitude towards structuring curriculum is...

  • Motivate students with problems that are: relevant to their lived experiences and realistic in software dev.
    • Relevant is more important than realistic.
  • Teach the conceptual approach first.
    • Students will be able to drive better if they understand the route we're taking ahead of time.
  • Then teach how to practically solve the problem.
    • Give directions to the correct solution; if a direction is left out, it should be intentional, and likely expressed.
  • Rehearse this enough until learners can start making unique solutions themselves.

OSS and Free Always

Until someone tells us otherwise, this will be OSS under the CC Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license

Communication & Resources