If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times—and you’ve had to listen to it every time I say it: finding development talent is the biggest problem holding back most startups, these days. And Oregon is no different. That’s why Portland’s Treehouse launched Code Oregon, a project designed to create 10,000 new developers. And now, Treehouse could use a little help of their own.
This awesome project is in the running for the Close It Summit’s Jobs Madness award, a contest that awards $100,000 in cash prizes to three grand prize winners. But the trick is, they need your vote to get there.
Take a look at what they’re doing. And if you think it’s compelling, consider voting for them.
For more information or to see some of the other entries—and to vote for Treehouse (as Treehouse Island, Inc), visit Jobs Madness 2014.
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Fixed! Thank you for letting me know, Russ. It should have been http://teamtreehouse.com.
Your Treehouse link is to a software company outside of Pittsburgh.
As a student of Treehouse (through Code Oregon) and someone who teaches coding to beginning students, I question the ‘quality’ part of the video. The courses I’ve taken are understandable and very simple but don’t give students (especially beginners) much practice in doing any substantial coding project. Basically, your ability to get through a course is based on some multiple choice (which you can take over many times until you can guess the right answer) and some ‘workshop’ questions where you write a few lines of code (most of the code is already given to you in the video so basically all you need to do is ‘parrot’ this code to get the answer).
Most beginning students don’t just need to know the syntax of the the languages but they also need to be able to sit down with a problem statement and write a solution on their own. In other words, they need to generate ‘problem solving’ skills and quite frankly, none of the courses I’ve taken address this critical skill for being a sucessful software developer.
I’m not just picking on Treehouse here. All the online courses I’ve taken (such Gregg’s Code School, Udemy and a few others) have the same problem in that they don’t have students do a substantial project on their own and hand it in for feedback.
One solution might be to offer weekend or evening workshops in the Portland area to allow students to at least get some ‘hands-on’ experience in coding a resonably-sized project. I’m not sure how feasible this would be for an ‘online’ course but I’m thinking that most Code Oregon students live in or near the Portland area so it might work.