| | Edmond Hui | This curriculum will teach you how to code. Succeeding is up to you. What you do with the knowledge App Academy teaches is up to you. Your projects and what you learn while building them will be more important than the fundamentals that they teach during the curriculum. Learning how to teach yourself and correctly identifying errors and bugs something you will learn App Academy and will be something that will be important in your professional career. Overall the App Academy curriculum is great and there are instructors who are there every step of the way. Once you finish the program, the training wheels fall off and you have to keep yourself regimented to keep learning & coding. |
| | Christopher L | After attending App Academy, I can truly say the experience was something else. App Academy is a fast paced bootcamp that teaches you several technologies and languages. Some pros and cons will be listed below Pros: The structure of the entire course is well put together. I believe they did an excellent job teaching Ruby, a language that reads almost like English, in order to allow students to transition into a programming mindset. Pair programming everyday allowed students to gain experience elaborating their thoughts and putting it to words. The final projects were the best idea enabling students to put in more work than before and learning how to program themselves without the extensive help of TA's. Cons: The tests are a bit too easy. There is a clear distinction between the level of students towards the end of the course. The tests become repetitive and actually mirror some practice tests. By mirroring practice tests, students begin to memorize these not furthering their skill set. Python should be taught instead of Ruby. Ruby is great for new people entering the world of programming but Python is similar to Ruby and is used more throughout the industry. I know it's hard to switch curriculums and is very time consuming but it would be beneficial to students. |
| | RL | Before you sign up, this isn't a golden ticket to a 6-figure salary on a silver platter after graduation. This program provides you the foundation needed to succeed, what you get out of the program will depend on you. Some things that are a guarantee is: -Be frustrated during this journey, you will feel the urge to quit because learning is not always easy. -You will meet great & awful people, welcome to the club. -Prepare to be working 12+ hours a day, including weekends to meet the deadlines. Even after graduation. -You will learn to be a better coder and communicator Suggestions for App Academy: 1) Focus on more industry-relevant technologies. Java? Python? More data structure & algorithms? 2) Get more partnerships with companies, show companies that your bootcamp graduates are capable. 3) More post-graduate assistance. 4) Parts of the curriculum felt rushed and other times too slow, the timing of the curriculum needs to be improved. 5) Most curriculum videos are severely outdated and lackluster |
| | Alexandria W | App Academy is a great starting point to coding if you need structural guidance and strict time management along your journey. But after all, it’s on you to decide how would you like to learn. Pros: - The well-structured curriculum consists of 11 weeks of lecture+pair programming projects, 2 weeks for a fullstack project, 1 week for a MERN group project, 1 week for a JavaScript Project, and finally 1 week of career quest lectures and pairboarding time. The goals of each week are clearly stated so you know what to expect. - The projects are precious hands-on experience that will help you have a full picture of what software engineering is, especially the MERN group project where you have a lot of freedom and needed to collaborate with classmates. Cons: - Class sizes varied and a/A claims to maintain a TA to student ratio of 1:9 - 1:10. However, in the later weeks, it took a long time for a TA to come and questions were left unanswered at the end of the day. (We were encouraged to not attempt unfinished projects after lesson time.) - TAs come and go throughout the bootcamp. Understandably, they would leave the TA position once they get an engineering job, but that means some new TAs would not be fully aware of the ability of some students and provide adequate support. |
