Neue Coding's
Learn to Code with AI
Accelerate your learning by leveraging AI as your personal tutor
A new course incorporating live experience and AI as your personal coding tutor. Learn with structure in a peer environment and with AI by your side to help you at any point.
What is it?
Learn to Code with AI is a new intro to programming course that is optimized for adult learners.
Integrating insights from our experiences with distance learning, learning in this course driven through:
- Personal agency: In a “flipped classroom environment”. Review and practice concepts asynchronously, on your own time. 6-8 Hours a week
- Community: Meet live weekly to apply concepts in collaborative problem solving environment (pair programming)
- Just-in-time support: Leverage ChatGPT as your personal coding tutor
Format
Live video meetings combined with small directed coding tasks culminate in a game you’ll code from scratch yourself.
You’ll be supported the entire time with a group of your peers as well as AI that can answer your questions at any hour of the day.
What you’ll learn
The course uses the Python language, a well-known and versatile langauge that can be used in many different domains and disciplines. We teach the course with a subset of Python language features in a way that focuses on coding fundamentals and concepts so that students can take their knowledge post-course in whatever direction they would like- data science, web development, etc. We teach without using libraries or frameworks that require specialized knowledge or that could go out of date. At it’s base, learning to code teaches a process of thinking that deals with abstraction, logic and systems thinking that we think is powerful and useful in many different domains.
Learning Outcomes:
- Independence with the topic. Knowing how to ask the AI questions to help you get started / get unstuck.
- Basic familiarity with coding logic.
- Basic familiarity with Python syntax.
Pedagogy
How we teach
We designed this course around the best practices we’ve culled from our experience teaching intro to CS and Progamming at the University level and Bootcamps.
- Flipped classroom: asynchronous lecture and practice
- Live pair-programming
- Integrating ChatGPT as a personal tutor
Course Structure
All topics are organized around specific tasks that students complete, where each concept is applied towards a concrete goal.
On a week-to-week basis, this looks like:
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4-6 hours learning and practicing in a “flipped classroom environment”
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2 hours of in-person time
What is a flipped classroom anyway?
A flipped classroom is an instructional approach where the traditional teaching model is inverted. Instead of learning new material during in-class time and doing homework afterward, students are introduced to new content outside of class (usually through readings, videos, or interactive modules), and class time is dedicated to engaging activities like discussions, problem-solving, and applying the knowledge they’ve gained.
Key Features of a Flipped Classroom:
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Come to Class Prepared: Students learn foundational material on their own time before class through videos, articles, or tutorials. This allows them to learn at their own pace and come to class with some level of understanding.
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In-Class Activities: Class time is reserved for deeper learning, including hands-on activities, discussions, group work, or problem-solving. This allows the teacher to facilitate rather than lecture and provides an opportunity to address any misunderstandings.
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Teacher as Coach: In a flipped classroom, the teacher acts more as a facilitator or coach, guiding students through complex tasks, answering questions, and providing individual or small group support.
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Student-Centered: The model is often seen as student-centered because it shifts the focus from passive reception of information (lectures) to active learning through engagement and collaboration in the classroom.
Peer Learning
The majority of the time in the live video meetings are devoted to “pair programming”, which in a pedagogical context is a peer learning session. Students work though a coding challenge together that forces them to interact and share problem solving strategies while discussing the concepts in that session. We think this is a perfect way to cement understanding of that week’s topics.
AI
During student’s flipped classroom solo work, they are instructed to use AI as a resource to help them as they work through a topic’s coding challenge. Rather than a tool for cheating we see AI as the perfect in-context tutor.
All of the courses problems can be explained and solved by all the state of the art LLM AIs. (Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, etc.). In the course, AI is used as a tool to get students unstuck (a common issue in computer science coding tasks), further explain concepts and help students explore tertiary topics if they so wish.
In addition, once students have gained fluency with basic code structure and the ability/vocabulary to prompt the AI with the correctly phrased questions, AI can help them construct real-world code applications post-course. The course not only instructs students on how to use the AI as a knowledge tool, but also as a tool for investigating and coding programs that are more complex.
Who Are We?
Andrew and Akira have known each other since Lakeshore elementary school in San Francisco. Together they have a few decades of classroom and curriculum writing experience for children and adults in a variety of modalities.
Andrew is an adjunct professor of computer science at the University of San Francisco. He was previously at the San Francisco Unified School District creating technology curriculum for K-12.
Akira is a previous distiguished faculty at General Assembly where he taught the Software Engineering Immersive course. He was CTO of Rocket Academy, a venture-funded coding bootcamp startup in Singapore.