Photo credit: 1KE.
When Liu Yi first learned how to code, she was taught via blackboard. Her middle school teacher would scribble lines of BASIC in chalk, and students would follow suit.
“Our programming classes were a bit strange,” says Liu Yi, CTO of 1KE, a coding education startup based in Shanghai. “You’d have to write the steps on the board, as if you were coding on the blackboard.”
Liu Yi teaches web development at 1KE, which offers online coding classes to students all over China. The startup targets university students, as well as professionals who want to pivot towards a more technical career, whether it’s digital marketing for a tech company or writing code for Chinese tech giants like Alibaba. The guiding ethos behind 1KE’s teaching method is practice, not theory.
“When we design classes, we try to show you a visual [of] the result you can achieve,” explains Liu Yi. “And then you practice the technique.” For example, students learning HTML and CSS might dive into the source code of an existing web page, before making their own website from scratch. There’s no need to memorize every single concept, she explains.
“You shouldn’t have to […] buy a thick textbook, or look at lectures over and over again, only to realize that you just need to absorb a tiny fraction of it,” Liu Yi says, referring to traditional teaching methods at Chinese universities. “[That’s] a force-feeding way of teaching.”
Currently, 1KE offers classes in frontend web development, Java web development, PHP, digital marketing, and product management. Similar to coding programs in the US such as General Assembly, 1KE students follow a two to three-month-long curriculum, learning through various hands-on projects, such as using Bootstrap to build a commercial website. At the end of the course, 1KE students have the chance to connect with employers through 1KE’s network.
“The goal of […] 1KE is helping you get a better job,” says Nick Han, CEO of 1KE. “We want to make sure you can apply the skills on the first day of your job.”
1KE students in one of the startup’s offline campuses in Xi’an. Photo credit: 1KE.
Learn by doing
In many ways, 1KE’s teaching methodology stems from Liu Yi’s own personal experience. Though she majored in computer science at Shanxi University of Science and Technology, most of her technical knowledge is self-taught.
“My college education was actually pretty disappointing,” she says. Classes were theory-laden lectures, and students weren’t expected to actually implement anything. She recalls one class in particular, where students learned about operating systems, threading, and microcode. She loved it at first, excited by the prospect of building her own operating system.
“In the end, when the course was almost over, I realized that the teacher wasn’t going to let us write an operating system,” she says. “I didn’t have any motivation to continue learning.”
Instead, Liu Yi satisfied her curiosity at the university’s internet cafe. Unlike Chinese internet cafes today, which focus almost exclusively on gaming, internet cafes served a broader purpose in the early 2000s, because fewer people had internet access. Still, they had a seedy reputation – something that the industry hasn’t shaken off today.
“I was still pretty well-behaved freshman year because I didn’t have the courage to go,” Liu Yi laughs. During her sophomore year, she entered an internet cafe for the first time. “Everyone went to internet cafes to game. And they were all guys – very few women ever went.”
In terms of web development – and web literacy – Liu Yi started at the bottom. She had no idea what the internet was. One of her schoolmates who worked at the internet cafe had to help her register for her first email address. “A lot of people thought the internet was just Yahoo [because] if you opened up the browser, the homepage was Yahoo,” she recalls.
Liu Yi in the early 2000’s, when USBs became available in China.
But soon, Liu Yi advanced to gaming, chatting online, and making her own websites, eventually building and managing the university’s Bulletin Board System (BBS) forum. At the bookstore, Liu Yi learned HTML on her own. During normal lecture hours, she couldn’t stop thinking about her website and how she could improve it.
“I […] decided that I wouldn’t sleep at night – I would go to the internet cafe,” she says. “I started pulling all-nighters because going online at night was cheaper.”
The people around her in the internet cafe turned out to be a vital support community as she hacked away at her own projects. In those days, there was no Stack Overflow, no coding Meetups. But Liu Yi learned a lot from her internet cafe peers, such as how to upload files to the internet using FTP. She also met a lot of mentors through the community, who directed her towards the right skills and tools, such as CSS, Dreamweaver, and Flash, to improve her website.
That’s essentially what 1KE wants to replicate with its teaching method. Unlike MOOCs, where students are almost entirely self-taught, 1KE teachers are there to act as mentors as well as teachers, guiding students, answering questions, and giving feedback.
“If you’re self-taught, you don’t know your blind spots,” says Liu Yi. “We will accelerate the student’s pace of learning, or tell you where you can be fast, where you can be slow, where you should focus your studies.”
If you’re self-taught, you don’t know your blind spots.
As the demand for software developers continues to rise worldwide, more and more coding education companies are emerging in China to meet domestic needs. In addition to 1KE, there are also other coding and IT training services, such as Tedu and Aptech. There are also coding education companies targeting younger children in China, such as CodeMao, which announced a US$2.9 million round of series A funding earlier this week.
Converted from Chinese yuan. Rate: US$1 = RMB 6.95.
This post This CTO learned how to build websites in Chinese internet cafes appeared first on Tech in Asia.
from Tech in Asia https://www.techinasia.com/liu-yi-profile-cto-1ke
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