A new developer school will on January 12 2015 open its doors to developers in Kenya to help them to learn mobile and web development skills from top mentors and instructors from around the world in an immersive environment.Speaking exclusively to TechMoran, Audrey Cheng, Co-founder Moringa School, writer at HuffingtonPost said, “We’ve partnered with Hack Reactor, the top U.S.-based code school, to establish a data-driven curriculum on Android, Ruby on Rails, UI/UX skills and more. During the 12 weeks, students will also have the opportunity to gain hands-on experience at an internship. At the end of the program, our students will have the skills necessary for a junior-level Android development position.”
Moringa School will be the third such school to launch code classes in Kenya, as demand for ultra-awesome developers increase. The Nairobi Dev School, an non-profit veture is now a little over a year-old while US’s Andela announced it will establish base in Nairobi soon, after Nigeria.
Cheng told TechMoran that Moringa School aims to fill a market gap, she and her partner saw in the Kenyan market.
“There’s definitely a market for our class. My partner and I went to a number of universities in order to gauge interest for our class. We found that students didn’t think what they were learning at university was enough to find a job because rather than learning practical application of computer programming, they were learning theory that they didn’t know how to apply,” Cheng said.
Cheng and her co-founder Frank Tamre also found that many students were willing to pay for an intensive 12-week course that will equip them with skills, experience and a portfolio to come out as junior mobile and web developers.
With the proliferation of online services such as Coursera, edX, codeacademy, YouTube tutorials among others, Moringa School remains adamant that physical classes matter a ton because learning to code–and code well–is hard as there are numerous roadblocks that new developers face and are tough to overcome without the proper community and support to guide them in their learning.
Moringa School will therefore give the students the power of a developer community which will inspire them to support each other and propel their learning beyond the instructor’s imagination.
At the moment, the school is focused on finding the best students for its pilot class and is calling for applications here. Moringa School’s curricular is listed here.
Unlike Nairobi Dev School, Moringa School is a for-profit business and believes it has value for the market. The Android-focused school co-founders say they believe in people’s potential and know that Kenyans can be as globally competitive in programming as anyone else in the world and want to open more jobs and opportunities to local Android developers by giving them world-class training.
With such initiatives, the government doesn’t have to spend $6,000 per student annually on post-university training sessions.