Codam College: Free High Quality Education with Victoria Ous and David Giron

Hi everyone. My name is Patrick Akio and for today's episode we cover Codam, a revolution in computer programming, education, no teachers, no tuition, and still a great education. How do they do that? While listening to Find out Joining me today, I have two guests, Victoria House, Head of Partnerships and Talent over at Codam College, and David Guerre, director at Codam College and he was part of the founding team over at the 42 Network where

they invented this model. All their socials in the description below. Check them out. And with that being said, enjoy the eisode. I'm out of breath. Beyond coding you.

Will come home often. Once a week? Once a week? Once a week, Yeah. OK, Yeah. And all the other days you're on campus? Yes, this is because, you know, we are a small team. We're only 12. Yeah. And we have 400 students, right. So you need to be there, yeah, To make sure that in case if something happens, there is somebody one on campus to to jump right in. Yeah, then that makes sense. But still, 12 people is, isn't that too little?

Yeah, I it blows my mind, honestly, how you do that with 12 people. Yeah, but 400 students? 12 people like you don't have any teachers on staff. How do you do that? Each of the student is a teacher. Yeah, right. So they have each other's backs. The peer-to-peer model. That's what it says, that they need to interact with each other and exchange knowledge. There is no ultimate teacher in there. Everybody has a bit of a knowledge that they can share with each other.

Yeah, and help each other out. Exactly.

Before we zoom into the peer-to-peer model, can you explain it a little bit on how you got in touch with Codem in the first place? They've been around for.

Two or three years before I joined them and at the beginning they were like a pretty well known because the the school was opened by the queen of course couldn't figure our founder who's the cofounder of TomTom, she is a big figure within the tech ecosystem and I've been working in the the startup and investment scene in the Netherlands since the beginning of my career. So they were already making a lot of waves in the in the ecosystem. So yeah, that's how I joined them.

That's really cool. How long ago was that? Three years now. Three years now, Yes. Yeah, That's a good time actually.

What about you, David? Well, I was actually the first employee of Codem when it was founded back in 2018, but my story goes a bit more back in time. I'm actually part of the founding team of the, let's say, parent school of Codem. That's called 42. Maybe you've heard about the 42 network that is all over the world now. So back in 2013, I was part of the team who created the concept, and back then I was the

head of study at that school. So I was in charge of designing the educational model, the content and so on. And well, one thing led to another. And no, I'm the director of the beautiful school in Amsterdam. It's just the best thing that happened in my life ever. That's awesome. I love hearing that. But walk me through kind of back in 2018, you conceptualized this idea. You were involved with that.

Yes, definitely. So the the, the way it works that when I was still working 42 in Paris, we were often approached by people from other countries who wanted to export the the model into their the country. And one of my roles was to to help them do that. So to to explain them how it works because there's a lot that people see about the school but the model, but it's actually much more than me to be eyes, so to make sure that they really understood that they were setting foot in.

Also to train their staff and to go on site to to help them open the the place, help them with the the design of the building of course, but also if training the the staff, welcoming the first batch of candidates and students well, making sure that the the school can start actually.

Yeah, I mean, I've been on campus with with you, Victoria, and when you explain the model to me, it kind of blew my mind. But I still have I I still have a struggle kind of explaining it to other people because it it. How do you say that? It's a lot the model and it's very different from what you would expect. Like how would you explain what the model is in and of its own in the first place? Sure. So I would say that we try to do something that is radically different from traditional

education. In traditional education it is teacher centered. So that means that the students are facing some kind of passive learning experience. We are sitting in a classroom listening to teacher, usually in front of the white board or. In the classroom. And we wanted to get away from that, try something else where the student would be at the very center of their education

experience. And we have nothing against traditional education, but we wanted to try something else and that's what we did with this model. So we decided to go for a peer-to-peer learning model. So as Victor explained, the students are learning with each other's and from each other's. We tried to to get entirely rid of all the teaching approach. That's actually a word that we tried not to use. We do not teach our students.

They learn by themselves altogether and for that they they rely on the community of students. Well, to go a bit further in details, so they don't have any kind of lectures or anything like that. All the learning experience goes through solving projects. So we created a bunch of projects that are crafted in such a way that the students don't need to have previous knowledge in order to be able to give a try to that project.

So contrary to regular education, where a project's just applying the knowledge that you acquired from the lecture or the practical session. Here the students have first to understand what is expected from them, because most of the time they have no clue at all and understand or identify the bits of knowledge that they don't know yet, that they lack what What is it that they need to learn?

And that is something that is really relevant at every stage of your career afterwards, and then acquire that knowledge. So it should be through their peers, through the Internet or whatever other means they can find. The point is that eventually we need to get that knowledge and. Finally they will apply to the project to solve solve the problem. If they if they have any

questions, what do they do? Because there's no teacher. Yeah, going. To ask. They ask to the person to their left, and if they don't know, if they ask the person to their right. And if they don't know you know, move away, go somewhere else in the room, and you start over. Yeah, but we shouldn't forget about the online community that we have. So, OK, so maybe in house right now at this specific point in time, there is nobody that can help you out.

Then we have this Slack group. With all the Codam students first right. So you can ask over there if nobody picks it up. We are part of the 42 network right? This big network of students. I think right now we are at 13,000 around the world 40 seventeen 18,000 I'm. Sorry, yeah. And so basically somebody from Korea could know the answer, right? Or Brazil, you name it. So it's fully. Global actually.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You know, like I believe, if you want to be a good software engineer, you need to learn to work in communities. I agree. And we put community at the core. Yeah, so that's really, really cool. I mean, I can imagine the

students have a very different experience from either previous education or maybe they haven't even had any previous education. Like, what has been the feedback from the students that have gone through, got him and graduated in that way? Wanna take this one? So first of all, we as mentioned earlier, we are providing a different education model, right, because our kids or the youth is different.

Back in the day education was like a belt industrial belt and we give the same education model to all of them and then we expect that some of them are gonna perform better than the others or you know the same. Cookie cutter. Yeah, yeah. But that's not the way it works. So we wanted to provide, you know, something that is more efficient, works better for different type of people.

So if we look at this diversity as its core, just because we give a different educational model, the students that come to code on they this is their way of learning, right? They are curious by themselves, interestically, so they can. They don't need a teacher to stimulate the the, the curiosity or the commitment towards coming to school because they don't

feel like, you know, somebody's. With a stick behind and like you have to come to school attendance you know and if you look how to like perform afterwards and what they say is basically that this is like a unique way that gave them a real chance of this rediscovering learning right. So they for them it's it was been the way.

That they could actually stimulate this curiosity and implement it and then get the knowledge the way they wanted it, not the way somebody else imposed on them, right? Exactly so. I like that a lot because also

the first time you explained it to me, I feel like it translates a lot then, like your educational journey stops and if you come from a traditional university. Your work experience is gonna be very different cuz there is no teacher and you have to interact with your peers and there is no focus on that. More so on traditional education but with code on with kind of a peer-to-peer learning model. I feel like you're already step of head because that is.

That's for sure. That is more in line with what happens actually. I would say that's where our education model shines the most. Companies are extremely satisfied with the students. Well, actually so much that we cannot provide enough students just lining up. So that's a rather comfortable position to be in, but I would say it comes from one core idea in our model that is this learning to learn line. I know it's a bit cheesy say like that, but that's actually what we really do.

And I would even go as far as say that the software engineering part is just an excuse for this learning to learn approach. The languages, the technologies, the frameworks that the student learned, they don't really matter in the end. What do matter though is the learning process. Like facing something they don't know about, understand what it is about, understand What they

lack is knowledge. Acquire the knowledge like I explained earlier, and this really makes a difference later on when they get their first jobs and work for the first companies because. Every day of the day feels like a Monday at school. Like when you join your company,

you don't know the people there. You don't know the project you're going to work on. You might not be completely familiar with technology, You're not sure it's new for you and well, it happens to be like that every week at school. So there is no like big gap between the school and the company. It's pretty similar. Yeah, very interesting. One thing that I actually I

wanted to ask what in your opinion is the role of education providing hard knowledge? Providing a full on skill set for you to deal with external world and professional world. Yeah, I think that's a great question actually. For me, it's a combination of factors, right. But where I think the traditional education is lacking, it's always based on a certain grade or a certain goal. And there's no emphasis on like finding enjoyment in the

learning process itself. Because I feel like if you cannot find joy in whatever you're doing, more so on a day-to-day, then you're always gonna chase certain accolades. And once you hit those. Like, even marathon runners are people that, like, do sports on a really high level. When they win a gold medal, all of a sudden they've achieved what they wanted to achieve and they get depressed, right?

Because this was, this was the luck highest part they would go to and maybe they didn't find as much enjoyment in the process. They just really wanted that accolade and yeah, they get depressed. I feel like if you take kind of part of the journey and make that more enjoyable, it's more. Sustaining, that matters, not the destination. Exactly, that is. But I don't know what what education wouldn't tell. What do you think, David?

The way see things that you could see education from 2 radically opposite angle, one that could be just learning for the sake of learning, like you can see that a bit like a hobby you just want to improve yourself, you like learning. And at the other end of the spectrum I would say that raise the learning approach toward the specific goal like for instance to be industry ready work for a good company. And I think that if you keep only one of these sites.

It's not complete. You should find a good balance between the two so you can improve yourself as a human being, but you can also be useful for the time we are at with the technology we have, with the industry that we have right now and have a good career. Yeah, exactly. For me, for example, education

is formed of like 3 elements. The main goal of the education is to create. Individuals that are prepared to face the real world challenges, right? And mainly professional ones, right. But also like working together and so on. So that's why it's three. Number one, of course, it's knowledge, right? We are here to provide knowledge. It's not kumbaya type of, you know, education. Yeah, #2, it's about skills, soft skills. And #2 #3 is about how to deal

with your mental health, right? But it's again skills, specific skills that help you navigate and don't get burned out. You feel when you're getting burned out and so on and so forward. And then you know how to cope with it. And Codem, how does this is basically, first of all, the knowledge, the way the first one, right? The knowledge, the way they get it is they go and search for it. It's not like passive, but it's active learning. It's not given to you.

It's not given right? And you are allowed to go as deep as you want. We are. We don't impose per se deadlines for every single project, we pace them. But if you want to take three months, build the most insane video game that you want, who am I to tell you? You're not allowed to do that if your interest lay within the gaming industry, right? So in this way, we actually allow the students to go in some of the topics as deep as they want and in others, you know,

they're like okay, Yeah, okay. I need to know how to establish a virtual machine and then I'm going to do it for three weeks and then just go go over it because it's not something that I'm interested in, right. But I need to know that. I need to know that because we consider that that's important for you to know as a software engineer. Now the the second part was like the peer-to-peer model establishes this connection. With your peers, with the team,

with the. SO when you plug this student into your team, they know exactly how to ask questions and how to ask which type of questions, right? Because first what they will do, they will try to search the answers on the Internet and only then they will actually come to the manager, right? So they don't expect that the manager would be all like the teacher, the new teacher, because of the tradition model you take away the teacher and the and the student or the kid is getting.

Overwhelmed, right? We should not forget that youth.

They have a big imposter syndrome. Is some person that they don't know. They somehow look up to the people and then they feel that whatever they currently know is not enough, right? But they actually have great knowledge already. So for us, even the third element remember what I said about the mental health. Of helping them out. To go, like, get over that imposter syndrome is super important. For example, we say is the education that we need to teach our kids to fail.

But then you don't pass your exam. Once you're done, you're no. I think you have three chances because then you have to redo the course next year, which is sad kids are not taught to. Play right? Especially programming right? I mean, you're in front of your terminal and then you just submit code and then you see if it's working, you know? So you shouldn't take it. Like if if the computer says no, you should not take it personal or anything like that. So the same thing at code.

I'm like every Friday there is an exam you didn't pass this Friday, come next Friday, next Friday, we don't care. We don't judge. It's acceptable to fail. It's okay. You learn something. Now you know what you don't know, right? You go back in front of the computer, you learn it, You try it again. Yeah. So having knowledge, soft skills, and skills that could regulate your mental health like these are the three top priorities for education for me. For us to teach them, right.

Yeah, beautiful. I like that a lot. I think maybe if education was different, maybe even my career path would have been different because I always wanted to go in the gaming industry. But then my choices through our education didn't allow me to go to that university course, basically. And I tried and I was years behind and I failed and I was like okay. For me to catch up, I would have to redo a year or redo multiple years basically for me to be able to go in the game industry.

And I didn't like that. I didn't like also going through certain courses where I didn't feel. Enthusiastic about the content of it, right? Because always when you have education, there's a fundamental knowledge that you need to have. But exactly as you say, I might be passionate about certain aspects and not as passionate about certain aspects, but if they're all equal time wise, yeah, it's going to be kind of a dreadful experience, right?

I want to spend most of my time in the things that I'm really enthusiastic about. And sure, I still need fundamental knowledge because that's just going to help all around, I feel like, but because of those choices. I didn't want to do multiple years throughout that same educational system, so then I just went ahead with a different kind of choice of circumstances and I ended up here. Now I'm really happy I ended up here, but it could have been

completely different. Might the education system have been different as well? If I may ask, yeah, what did you

study before university? Before university, I was in high school. You have different educational systems in the high school. Yeah, right. Which we, for example, also find a bit weird that the kids are already filtered, yeah? You know, I've heard that before. Your choice is already limited. Yeah, for some of them, right? That's why we at Code On. We don't have a prerequisite of a diploma. We don't care what you dropped out from school, who knows?

What happened back then? Now you're a different person. You should get a chance to study. Yeah, yeah, I agree. So the people that know, like in the Dutch educational system, and I explained this to my girlfriend, she's from Italy. Like when you're about 11 or 12, you do like a certain set of exams and that already kind of

filters you out basically. That's gonna say, OK, you can go to this school where they have this level of education and you might go to a different school where they have. Like an easier level of education, basically more tailored towards what you can do in your capabilities. But those are all based on the exams that you did, so you are kind of filtered in your education and you can move up or down based on your performance. But that might require a few

more years here and there. Yeah, I I I have a a personal

experience like that. So I've been born and raised in France and when I was about 17, almost 18 years old, that was the the time when we're supposed to decide what kind of studies we wanted to do. Long story short, we had this orientation moments with some of our teachers and in particular that was the math teacher in my my classroom that was in charge of that and when it was my turn to come to his desk and talk with him about what I wanted to do later.

I told him that I wanted to do programming and I will never forget. The mind looked at me dead in the eye and said, Mr. Jean, you will never do programming, never do something else. Very painful. Yeah, but that's crazy. And if I had listened to that man, I would not have had my master in computer science and I would not be the director of a software engineering school. I mean, how can you say that to a kid? And even if it that was true? Why would you say that?

Why are you trying to crush the dream of that person? That's just no, it just mean at some point. There there is no reason to do. That no, you shouldn't, yeah.

I feel like like if you really want something, you can still do it, even though the educational system might be against you. Like I have a cousin and she always wanted to be a dentist. Like, she's two months younger than me. We grew up to get there. My family's pretty close and she always wanted to be a dentist. But you have to enroll in the university for dentistry, right? And it's how do you say that? It's like a lottery. Some people get it, some people

don't. Based on grades or just based on random chance and year after year she didn't get in. She finished her bachelor's in biomedical science year after year. That's a four 3-4 year bachelor. She finished the bachelor because she year after year didn't go into dentistry. Now she's Armenian from heritage and she was like, I can get into a school in Armenia, it's going to take me 5 years. Now this year exactly, she's going to have been there for five years.

She finished completely her dentistry education abroad and she's going to come back to Holland. It makes me really, really happy that she's been able to do that. But like, the period of her education is way longer than it might have been or should have been in that aspect. That makes me a bit sad. Plus, she's been away for five years. That was a waste of time. That was pretty hard. Yeah. But I'm really happy she's gonna come back. Yeah. For the students, that

onboarding code, I don't know what their mindset is coming into this. I'm assuming they're super enthusiastic. But what is that onboarding like ramp up process for them because they also coming from high school or from different educational backgrounds. I think they need to get used to this kind of way of educating. Yeah, we do one month selection. We call it actually a PC in the French. It's a mean swimming pool. So what we do, we just throw them into the water and then we

see which one swims. Yeah, but it's sort of the same like the logic behind it is like. You throw them into the deep waters and they need to figure it out by themselves. Don't forget, the majority already went at least through school. Maybe they didn't finish high school, but they went through school. The school system says you have a teacher in the front here, there is nothing, and they are confronted with a model for the first time.

So each candidate has to decide for themselves two things. Number one is programming for me, because they already Start learning C, right. So yeah, and #2. He's the educational model for me. And then they have four weeks. They have to come to code in person every single day, included weekends too. So it's very intense. On average, they spent 10 hours of learning per day for you to understand. So I think when they come, they don't know what to expect.

They have no idea. But then throughout time. They become best friends. It's like such a community because they have to engage with each other, right? There's no other way. So then for them even having this 10 hours in in the building, it feels like, Oh yeah, I'm like hanging out here, you know? It's a summer campus. It's a summer campus and the beauty is also that we do not segregate, right?

So sometimes we have candidates that have some social engineering education, you know, from from before. Maybe they did the Coursera. Or something like that. Others never heard about it, others are like 55 year old with like experience working in teams and so on and others are 18 that comes straight from high school right? Because we do not segregate and because we have the peer-to-peer model the the connection between them happens and the exchange of

knowledge happens. So the guys that did some Coursera course. They will be the first ones to actually help out the the novice people in in programming to to to get some knowledge. But at the same time the 55 year old right will actually share you know knowledge about like how do we divide tasks in the group.

Okay you do this because it's going to work every two hours we meet and we we exchange what we did again you know so because we do not segregate the the this cohesion happens and knowledge happens. Yeah, everyone comes together and kind of leverages their experience, and their experience is different. Yeah. And I can imagine that the group that comes together is quite diverse as well. If you don't really have a bar for entry, then everyone just comes and everyone that wants to

come can enter. Well, the the rule to join Kudan is actually to be 18 of age. That's the only rule. That's the only rule the. Only rule, it's free. No background, no, no diploma whatsoever. It just come as you are. Yeah.

And then after that four weeks would. Sounds quite intensive I must say. People have decided, OK, this educational is for me and this is what I want to do, right? I want to be a software engineer or something in the tech related field. In that way, what is the educational system that you already said? It's like a peer-to-peer review model. The people have to be on campus. Let's start with that. You mean during the selection time? Not after after those four

intensive weeks. OK, so your question is about how does it work on the campus afterwards during the? Okay. So basically the the, the curriculum itself is divided into several levels, let's say of progress and each level features a set of projects and obviously the more your progress the more difficult it's going to be. And that's about all the structure. They varies really. There are no timetables or anything like that.

You can the school is open 24/7. So you come when you want and you start to work on a project that you like, that is at your level right now. Obviously you will work with other people. They will help you, you will help them. If it's a group project, you will join your team and work all together. Until the moment you're pretty much done with it and you decide to to submit your work, and then we engage what's called the peer

evaluation system. So that's something that is loosely inspired from academic peer reviewing. The idea is that when the scientists want to publish a paper or an article, it is reviewed by their peer and there are several iterations until the content is good enough. So here the idea is pretty similar like when a project is complete and then it goes through several rounds of evaluation with a random with some random people.

So it can be between 3:00 and 5:00 depending on the scale of the project, and then the project is evaluated according to a grading sheet that the staff provides. But it is students evaluating other students, and thanks to the randomness of it, we can ensure that it's not like your worst enemy or your best friend was going to evaluate you.

We can detect the anomalies over there and in the end we calculate the grade and if it's high enough, the project is validated and the student or the team can move on. If it's too low, then the project is failed. And in that case, I think that's one of the the most interesting aspects of code. The only consequence is that the students or the team can start over. And that's all that happens. No shame, no thing like that. That's okay. You are not ready yet.

So give it another try and come back when you're ready. And so the impact of that is that obviously all the students are not progressing at the same pace. But thanks to that, all the students are not progressing at the same pace. You can take their time. If you're a slower learner, that's fine. It doesn't matter. It's not the race. If someone needs a week or a month to complete a project, I

don't really care. What I do care about though is that in the end they all required the knowledge. Yeah, I like that a lot, that not everything happens at the same pace, cuz that's also something I've experienced throughout my educational journey. It would be like okay, you would be done. You would have to play around and wait for the other people to also be done before you can go and the next thing would be

explained to you. For sure and there also the problem of if you have a string of sequence of projects if you fail the first one. It makes no sense to try to do the second one. You didn't manage to do the first one. I mean, come on, take the time to learn the basics and then you can move on. Yeah, so all the modules they need to be completed for them to move on to like a subsequent one, yeah? Or should I imagine like a linear path? Or is it more like graph? No, it's like a graph.

Like a graph, it's. Like a graph, right? It's even bit more complex. Like I said, you have several levels of projects, so they are laid out as a concentric circles. You start at the first project at the very center, Then once you beat it, you can move it to the next circle that features three projects. You can beat the projects in the order you like, but you need to beat all of the projects in order to move on to the next

layer. And so on and so on until you reach the outer circle. And then that's the final project of the curriculum. That is the internship. Then I think I'm going to give the state to Victoria to tell you about that part. Yeah, it's basically a professional experience. Remember again about the impostor syndrome. These guys are like every time when they come to me, when they get to that last project, you know, they come to me and they're like I don't even know

what what, what am I good at? I don't know like what what, what, what kind of, you know, job do, do I want or do I like and so on. So we are using this professional experience to give them a safe way to test what they like and what they are good at. So I always tell them, like, create three sets, 3 assumptions, basically. Number one, what kind of company do you believe you will like? Because some of them come and they believe that they know. But I'm like, wait, you never

worked in a startup. You gotta know that, you know, it's a good fit for you. So I say okay. What kind of companies, maybe governmental organization, maybe corporate, maybe scale up, you know, and so on and so forth. And then the second assumption is what kind of industry? Like, choose something that is aligned with your passions. And of course every student says no. But I don't know what I like. And then I'm like, okay, if you

read Tech Crunch, right? What are those articles that you know pop into your mind and you actually read the entire article exactly right? Is it something related to fintech? Is it about crypto? Is it about, you know, like AI? So then you choose make the assumptions that you will like this right? And then the third, of course, because we provide only C&C knowledge. So for them it's a bit difficult to choose like a back end front ender maybe.

I want to do app development, so I always encourage them to choose one or two. They usually go for the back end or full stack. Very few of them like front end, don't ask me why. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then and then based on these three assumptions, I tell them to search something Okay. At first when we implemented, when we started in 2018, we called it internship Okay Okay. Because also the companies, when they looked at us, we were like

so alien to them, right? And when the students would go and say like Okay, I'm looking for an internship, blah blah blah. And they would look saying like what is this Kumbaya type of education, right, like you don't have teachers and so on. So for us, actually at first it was very difficult to find the first batches of companies that would take the interns. Yeah, I can imagine. Time passed. Where? What is it, almost five years now, right?

The word is out. The companies that worked with cotem students, they just, they're just waiting for the next one, you know, they're just waiting for the inbound. And since September last year, I noticed that the majority actually get permanent contracts or one year contracts rather than internships. So this is actually a great indicator. That actually they are ready for

a junior position. They just do not believe in themselves that they do and they believe that if it's the title of internship it's a fail safe environment. Even though most of the companies if you hire a junior it's a fail safe because you don't you know like he's a junior. So you need to to put a bit of more effort in learning and and development of the person.

I would like to add something there because it works also the other way around for us. We need a way to make sure that our model actually does work out there, because it would be fair to question what we're doing like. Okay, It works within our building, with our students, with our staff, with our content, with our educational model, in our time frame, blah, blah, blah. So does it still work out there? And that's a very fair question.

Maybe we're just living in a bubble and if you go outside into real company, none of this will hold. So through these internships, we also alert that also allows us to test our model, do our student perform when they're in these companies. And let me tell you that yes, they do. The feedback from the company, the evaluation from the companies are like through the

roof. So for us, it's also a way to to to make sure that what we do is actually what is wanted out there, that it actually does work and Oh yeah, it does. Yeah, I like that a lot. And also props to those companies for offering like either a fulltime or a one year contract because that meets them more halfway, right. That already shows that, OK, we want you and we're willing to distinguish ourselves from other organizations by offering this to you already because we see the value add.

Yeah. And you know we leave in different times, five years in tech scene, it's a lot we we have to agree upon that, right. So five years ago everybody was hiring based on diplomas and we we do provide a certificate okay, but we are not an accredited organization. So for them for for the companies to hire the students, they didn't want to because they didn't have a diploma.

Now, five years past with Pandemic, in between, right when everybody started realizing how important you know software engineers are and how difficult it is to actually find some, they started. They shifted the the recruitment process towards skill based hiring, right. Fantastic. And imagine if the student is actually used to have only projects, no books, no nothing, Just give the student an exercise and see what's his or

her level of knowledge. And that's why right now with students, for them it's very easy with this technical interviews because this is just another Monday at Cordham, but. Yeah, exactly. I thought a lot, but you

mentioned it's not an accredited university. That also means like no one in the Dutch education system. If you go to university, you get studio financiating. It's basically a lump sum of money to help you throughout your education, right? It can help you either just finance all the books and all the material you need, or like travel, you even get a travel pass, which basically allows you free public transport. You don't get any of that. No, no. That's actually the pain point

of students currently. Yeah, And we are working since day one to actually mediate this with the Ministry of Education and so on. But it's difficult, Okay, I can imagine so. In order to get accredited, you need to have teachers. You don't have teachers. Well, how are you going to to to get that accreditation? That's so weird, yeah. At the same time, if you get accredited, then the government imposes different criteria on you. Standards. Standards, right. And here we go.

Then you lose the model, right? But because we still want to provide a different way to educate youth, yeah. We need to to maintain our flexibility, our agility. We try to not take things for granted. If there is something in our approach that doesn't work, we just change it. We don't want to stay like that because we need several levels of validation because before we can change anything. So we've a set of constraints that would kind of kill what we're trying to do.

If something doesn't work, we change and that's it. Yeah, yeah. I think that makes you more flexible than the traditional education and it's also that's. As a software engineer, that's what I see in practice as well. Of course you don't like bang up against the wall. If there's a wall, you move, you move out of the way. That's what you do. We pivot. But we do work on lobbying a lot. Do you want to talk about the French model that we are trying to advocate for? Oh, yes, sure.

So well, it's a bit different. So in France there is like, let's say this organization. That has been founded to help education that are bit out-of-the-box that are a bit different and obviously the school 42 in France is the flagship of that model. So it kinds of mimic all of the advantage that regular education would have but without being within the Ministry of Education. So it's called Grande called numeric.

And through that system, the students can still have the status of students, get grants or expencing the travel cards or things like that. And that is indeed something that we're trying to lobby to bring to the Netherlands. I like that a lot. Yeah, that makes all sense. Because what we like to say is like, we don't, we don't need the money from the Ministry of Education, right, Because you get the funding, the public funding.

We care about our students. Yes, they put equal amount of effort, you know, in their studies as traditional education. And they need to get, you know, those benefits because for them it's really tough. You might say, hey, but Kodom is for free. Fantastic. But the amount of expensive expenses that they have, right? I mean, how, how do they live? Right. So they have to work even though we say that this is a full time education. Yeah. So for them, it's not easy.

No, the cars are stacked against them and also have to have the mindset of because I was like that I wanted at the end of the day, I wanted the paper. Basically, I did my education. I wanted to be graduated so I can actually get a job and say, listen, I graduated. That was it. Basically, it was part of it. I still enjoyed the educational process, otherwise I wouldn't have graduated. But I really wanted that paper. Just by notion of okay.

If I have a paper, then getting a job is going to be easier, right? And you don't get an official recognition. At least that's kind of the mindset and I'm glad it's changing and it has changed, but that still might be a barrier of entry for people. Definitely, yeah. And we try to to help them too.

So besides the fact that we are a nonprofit and you know like we don't have any tuition fees, we actually have set up a separate fund where we allocate sort of scholarships, right. And it can be of whatever the the student need. It can be an cheap card, it could be you know like 400 year allowance or a bit bigger allowance you know per month.

And initially it was established again by it by Corina Figueroa like the the founder of code on. And recently we started noticing that there are corporates or like bigger companies that come to us and are willing to put money in there and give you know a set of scholarships to to specific target groups and that's okay, right. So we are happy to see that there is also a transition of understanding from the companies

that. It's time to support, you know, some of the students and give back and give back, yeah. Absolutely. So if you're listening out there and you feel like you could be helping us, please get in touch. We would love that. Yeah, absolutely. Cuz one of the things that for me was still, like, hard to grab was how's the education Free in the 1st place. It's a nonprofit, doesn't make money. So there's no income, It's completely a charity. It is privately founded by the Stirtting Codem.

And that is itself founded by Madame Coin Vigre, who we mentioned earlier. And that's it, that we are just living on the foundation. Yeah, simple as that. Yeah, that's amazing. I think it's an amazing way of giving back. To the community, it is a very beautiful project. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Then when it comes to the educational system, how long is it, and is there some kind of thing like a masters or like a specialization afterwards as well? So it is in in two parts. So first we have this curriculum that we call Kodemco that lasts for up to two years. It is the the fundamentals of programming here. The students will mostly learn about C programming and story move towards C But as I mentioned, the languages are not

really what matters. It's all that varies around yeah, Long story short, when they finish this curriculum they have to pass the internship. That lasts for six months and upon validation then they graduate from the Kodemco curriculum and they're facing a choice. We can choose to move on with a career and stop there, which is perfectly fine, or we can decide to come back for more.

And we have the 2nd curriculum that we call Kodem Advanced that is an expertise track that lasts for about two years as well. And that will really focus on more state of the arts topic, so it's much more advanced. And in this regard, you can kind of compare the Kodemco to a bachelor and advance to a master, even though it doesn't map 11 obviously, but that gives you a ballpark idea of the level. Yeah, yeah, very interesting. And then the first batch of

people if I my column that were either in 2018 or 2019 graduated and now have been kind of in the workforce for four years. Do you keep in touch as well as kind of an alumni of? Course. Yeah, Yeah. We, we do like a homecoming every year, OK, in the March. And we always invite them for the graduation because they have to welcome the new album. Nice. I like that a lot. That is aside from a community.

Yeah, we have some of the alumni who also come back more on other occasions just to just to to be back in the in the school and to to give a hand when necessary. For instance, I'm thinking about Hope was back for the selection round. This guy is being out of the school for a few years now but decided to come back and help us welcome the newcomers like to train the. The candidates and I find it amazing that he's taking the time to do so, so.

One thing that I like to post is when they become managers, okay. So then they become managers and then they come to me and like Victoria, I'm a manager. I made it. I need interns. Yeah, yeah, I was like, look at you. You know, look at you. Yeah, exactly. That's amazing. So we actually see this as well that actually the alumni is prefer to hire from Godam. We have this event series, it's called called Talent Day which happens on a quarterly basis.

It's like a speed dating with companies always you know we have three or four companies that are from Alumni's. So they keep on coming back. I'm not really sure why right. It could be also this community feeling or the fact that they are so used to work with Codam. People, students or with this mentality that they still want to bring those type of people in

their team. Yeah, because for them, maybe it's easier to collaborate with a student rather than with somebody that is a bit more like stiff or you never know, Right, So. And also, you know what kality you're buying? You're right.

Yeah, but when it comes to organizations and let's say they want interns. Or junior engineers even. Do they come to code and ask for them? Or do you work with any organization? Like is there a certain set of organizations you don't work with? Not working with, Not really, no. I think there is one company that I blacklisted just because you know, a couple of students have bad experiences with them. But I'm not gonna say names. But overall, we are very open to collaboration and we don't

really differentiate much. One thing that I love about my job is that it's not like sales, right? There is no business model. Right. So one thing that I'm not allowed to is to push students into companies. I cannot do a deal with Microsoft that every year we're going to send 20 students to Microsoft. Why? Is because we democratize education. We give a choice to the youth, right? It's not about the money that are incoming into the school.

It's about giving the choice to that individual to choose whatever they wish to. Because if I have to give. 10 or 20 students to a specific company. I can easily manipulate my pitch in such a way that I will push a bit the students into specific companies, but I don't wanna do that. It's. Very important, it's. Super important. Yeah, it's part of the DNA of the school and actually of the 42 network is that the students are not a product.

So I know they're saying like when it's free, it's because you are the product. But in our case that's not true at all. We don't sell students anything like that. We train them and then we can choose wherever we want to go. It's just up to us to make sure that they have interesting offers and diversity of offers so they can find something they like.

And that's actually a good position to be in because the students can be picky a bit like yeah, OK, I won't this company or that company, you know, it's great. I was gonna say that that is fascinating, right? If there is no business model, normally when there is a business model and things are tight, like if everything is

good, then everything is good. But when things are tight, people do weird things and you'll notice and you get might get pushed or someone might communicate in a weird way, it's because they're incentivized. So they have a personal agenda like all that nasty stuff comes out of there. But if you take that out. And all of a sudden there's

freedom of choice. People can actually just go where they want to go where they would like to go, where the curiosity kind of drives them towards and make that choice right. No one is there to be like, no, you can't do that. You can do whatever you want. And I think that's the best position. Fortunately, that's the best position to be in. It's amazing. Yeah. A wall in the office with the thank you cards from the students. Yeah, I think it speaks volumes.

Yeah, I can imagine That is amazing and I like that you

touched on it earlier as well, David that. The educational model might not be might not only work specifically for software engineers, right? Oh yes, that that's a good point. That actually something I'm interested into on a personal level is what if we could apply this approach to different topics. I don't know and the broadest the better. So we could imagine, like don't know, journalist school or or. Chemistry. Entrepreneurship or dancing, whatever.

Like you have to be crazy to go crazy to really think something interesting. And with time, I realized that there is one challenge that needs to be solved in order to be able to apply this approach to any kind of topic is that by design, the students are going to fail a lot and retry a lot. Okay, that's part of the way it works with us. And a good thing about writing a program is that retrying to write the program doesn't really cost any money.

You do not consume anything. But you could imagine that in a profession or topic that consumes some material, it would be different. For instance, imagine that we are a woodworking school and one of the project is to build a chair and then the students are building that chair and the chair is failed. So now we used up some wood.

And we have to find what are we going to do with the, with the broken chair, are we going to dispose of it, can we reuse the wood and so on. So this would be the challenge for this kind of education. If there is some consuming consumables that are involved that that's a challenge. Yeah, I can imagine. And if people pick up bad habits, like, it's harder for them to get it out of there, right? If you're doing more stuff with your body, if we're talking about dancing, then that's hard

as well. Yeah, I like that. Software allows us for kind of that simplicity, right? For sure, because it kind of it kind of corners out those edge cases for you it's more how to say that more sandboxing, you can kind of manipulate what happens and it's easier to retry and restart. It was the ideal context to exactly go to that kind of education. But still, I'm hopeful for the future to see what other teams might come up with, maybe adapt the model.

I don't believe that it's with definitive answer, otherwise that would be boring. We would have solved the problem and hopefully we did not. Yeah, So that means that there is still things out there to to to be found and to be tried. And if we can inspire some people, that would be great. Maybe even we can inspire the traditional education to progress a bit. Maybe the the Ministry of Education will draw inspiration from from us. If you're listening, you can get in touch, aren't we?

We'll be happy to welcome you and have a chat. But the joke aside, I really hope that we can bring something new to the table to be an alternative to inspire over teams and see what they come up with themselves.

Yeah. Do you think because the the barrier of entry is still 18 years old, do you think you can lower that as well? Would it work in younger? So yes, for sure, for sure. So in our case, we want to have only people 18 or above for for just legal reasons, yeah, but obviously, especially in programming that that can be adapted to too much younger people. And there are other other groups who try to do that.

For instance, there is one team that we are really close to and they are good friends of us. It's called Tumo. They they originate from Armenia and they spread all around the world and now they have centers everywhere. And we we are helping them to to come to Amsterdam in the next year. And it's it's very close to what we do actually. But for younger students, I think it's from 12 to to 18 or something like that. Yeah, that's amazing. So yeah, wonderful synergy with

them. Yeah, beautiful. We truly need such thing in Netherlands because one of the toughest challenges that we have is to attract more females in the school, right? So right now we are having what is it? 30%. Yes. And in order for us to get to 5050. You really need to go early on and convince them that you know, like software engineering is an option for you, right? Because normally girls are brought up with like the idea that they need to study languages or you know, artsy stuff.

And if we would have actually a school that would show to them, you know, how technology can you know like help you or like increase your skills, even creative skills, right? Would be super helpful for us as as KODAM first of all.

And two more what they do is they have I think 16 programs and the all of them are the convergence of arts things and tech, right. So for example, you learn how to become a DJ or you learn to make animations. We've seen we visited the school in Yerevan, they created a full anime. Yeah kids. 14 years old? Yeah, insane. Or like they created this cartoon with like, you know, clay figurines. And then you take photos of like. Oh, those are really hard. It's so hard, right?

Yeah, they just did it and they learn these sort of things. And it's not a school. Please notice, not something that it replaces school. It's after school, OK, after school, two hours after school, you go there and you play around. And it's also peer-to-peer based. Yeah, it's peer-to-peer based, which is also beautiful. I think I would have loved that. Like, I mean the Parkcast is an artifact of it.

I've always been innately curious and just by curiosity, by these conversations, it gives me fulfillment. I don't know where it comes from, but it has always been like that. Even as a kid I wanted to understand why are things like they are. Why would I have a no instead of a yes? I would always want to understand and some adults did not like that, but I was always the same.

And I feel like throughout your childhood you might have that and some people might lose that right throughout their. Educational system throughout their adulthood, throughout the workforce, basically. But I feel like programs like that that stimulate creativity. You can do whatever you want as long as you do it basically right. Let curiosity Dr. you and see how far you come. I think that's beautiful. Also recently there is this trend of going into dream based education, right?

Like, we're always, so as kids put in a box that you can do this, but you cannot do the other thing, right? Or you're very influenced by whatever you see at home, right? If your mom is a doctor and your dad is a lawyer, that's everything, you know, right? And this sort of programs, actually you you see like an anime, right? And then you say, oh, I want to create this an anime, you know, myself, it gives you an opportunity to do so. Why not? Yeah, why not?

And then you can become a videographer. You can be a DJ, you name it, you know, So beautiful. Yeah, so impactful. I love that.

I love that. I've really enjoyed this conversation. I must say, I've loved learning about code. I mean, even before this conversation, I really got really enthusiastic about it. So I'm glad we got to do this. Actually, I'm really fortunate. Is there anything you still want to share that we kind of left off? Before we round off. Yes, there is one topic that I would like to touch as well.

It is the future of education because I like to believe that we are kind of pioneering, I can't speak. Yeah, pioneering. Thank you. The next level of education, what we apply effectively at Codem has been. Has been in the field for a while. People talk a bit about it for a long time, but The thing is that it's difficult to apply, especially when you take traditional education. The momentum is huge. So it's really difficult. So we are in a very blessed place for that.

But the question is then what next, what comes next? And you probably been quite aware of the latest. Advent of ChatGPT and the like, and these large language models are kind of a big deal now for education and also for software engineering as a whole. So in our situation, it opens a lot of questions and I find it quite exciting.

I've been doing a few conferences lately or talks with other educators, and I realized that people don't really understand what's coming, like there is a revolution, a big parting shift that is coming ahead of us. And the question is not do you like it or do you not like it or whatever, It's just coming. So what are you going to do

about it? How are you going to change the the practice in your school to to to adapt to it because your students, they will use these tools and what are you going to do? So for us it's a big question, we want to to be ready. So obviously these tools are completely allowed and encouraged within our education. But also believe that it should be framed in such a way that we we train, we coach, we encourage our students to use these tools in a meaningful and really useful way.

And that there is also the question afterwards of how it could impact the job that our students will have in the future. Because as software engineers, if there is a software that can write the code for you, then what are you going to do? And here I have hopes as well, because I do not believe that software engineers are going to disappear as a whole. I believe that the job will change in the future. We'll see what comes.

But so far that's my opinion that that the the current software engineers will be more like problem solvers. Like you have to understand what is the problem at stake, be able to express your problem in such a way that is understandable by the large language model that will be able eventually to to generate the code and so on. So I feel that it's a new chapter of education, in particular software engineering education. It is opening in front of us and

I'm quite excited to be there. Yeah, I like that a lot. I. I love that you'd highlight that. It's not a question of if it will come or will it come. It is coming, right? And you can think it's scary or you can think it's exciting because it opens up a lot of doors. Sure, what you've understood or how you might do things might change. They will change actually. But what it can open or or kind of increase in possibilities is

kind of incredible. It is like when I played with it, I was like, oh, this is different. Like this is something that is quite. People always talk about disruptive. No, this is disruptive for sure. It is, for sure. It's changing the way students can learn. It's coming and like it or not like it. It doesn't matter. It is there. Just adapt to it and the kids will, yeah. And one thing that I like is the educational model that Codem

already has, like a safety switch when it comes to GPT. Because when you do the peer-to-peer evaluations, you need to explain every line of code. Yeah, so you could have used JGBT to actually copy paste the code, right? That's fine, it's possible, right? But if you didn't understand what you wrote and why you chose this over the other.

You will fail. And the beauty is also it's not that you put the three people, the three evaluators in one room and you create a presentation, No, no, no. It's one hour with each evaluator. So if one will fail you, I mean you have to do it again. So this sort of systems actually help educators to, you know, avoid this sort of problems with JGBT because our educational model is not based on memory. Is based on understanding and the peer evaluation checks if you understood or you just

memorized it from somewhere. Stack Overflow, you know. Exactly. And then if someone asks you a question, it will not work, no, because if you don't have the understanding, you won't be able to answer. Exactly. And also the exams as well, right? So those are like exercises or programs that you have to write at the computer. There is no multiple choice, no nothing like that. It's pure coding, right? These sort of things help to alleviate the the effects of JGBT, you know?

Yeah, yeah, for sure. It's exciting times for sure.

Thank you so much for coming on. This was a lot of fun, actually. Thank you very much. Yeah, thank you. So I'm gonna round it off here. Victoria and David and Code. I'm going to put all their socials and some extra links in the description below. Check it out. Let them know you came from our show. And with that being said, thank you for listening. We'll see in the next one.