Development Course

After teaching in Tækniskólinn for 4 years both as guest teacher and as staff member, I had the opportunity to re-write the Web Development course from scratch in collaboration with my colleague Ellert Smári.

The course takes roughly one year to accomplish and leads the students through the most important competences they will need in order to start working in the field. It counts on 8 Modules, each of which are evaluated by active industry professionals. The study materials consist of 40 Learning Guides which help the students learn and practice all fundamental aspects of this craft.

Instead of classes, most of the students’ time is used in individual and group activities, going through the guides and exploring their diverse aspects according to each person’s interests. When questions or roadblocks emerge they get discussed with an instructor in depth and are often shared with the whole group. Each assignment return is delivered as a publicly available product, which allows for the early creation of a valuable portfolio.

In place of typical classes, there are 3 live coding sessions a week, plus 1 mob programming session and dozens of hours of practical workshops with guest instructors.

This original method allowed our students to learn fast and surprised the industry professionals that participated in the cyclical presentations Seminars over and over again.

The opportunity to have created such a product is exactly what makes me happy about work: spot a problem, imagine the best solution possible, test, improve, repeat. I believe this general framework is a good fit for a great variety of challenges in the business world and I’m looking forward to finding more of those.