Today we’re announcing the biggest change to Lambda School’s instructional design since inception. We’ve been building to this for a really long time, and I could not be more excited that it’s finally ready.
Announcing Build Weeks
Announcing Build Weeks
Previously, every fifth week at Lambda School was set aside for students to work on a pre-defined mini project to showcase mastery of the skills developed in the previous four weeks. That was a great version 0.1.
But now, instead of students working individually on pre-defined projects, students from all of Lambda School will be grouped to form cross-functional teams, and every five weeks Lambda School will effectively turn into a giant dev shop.
Each group will be responsible for building a fully-featured, scalable, production-ready application, and each student will be responsible for building the portion of the application they just focused on on the curriculum.
Students on the backend curriculum will build API/DB, frontend web, iOS and Android students will build their respective clients, students in the CS curriculum will optimize code for speed and scalability, UX will design the next batch of projects and perform user testing, etc.
Instructional staff will become senior management and project owners, reviewing code, maintaining high standards, and helping students correct any weaknesses before they are ready to move on to the next section.
The cumulative effect of this change is that by the time a student graduates they’ll have spent 10 full weeks (5 build weeks + 5 weeks of Lambda Labs) building applications on 6 different teams. Additionally, every student will graduate with a portfolio of 6 great applications.
We’ve always known that building real, production applications on real teams is a superior way to learn and showcase learning. But enabling this while simultaneously creating a way to verify that every student had mastered every objective was a Herculean effort of 20+ people
