The Jnaapti Journey – Learning From Kids

One of the most exciting moments for us was to watch 12 year olds programming in Python. Our record is being able to teach the use of a “for-loop” in Python to a 6-year old.

While we see Engineering students and Software professionals struggling with the syntax of programming languages despite having a degree in Computer Science, we were able to teach these kids basic programming constructs like looping and conditional within less than 3 hours. So when professionals say “Python is too hard”, we retaliate saying, “No, the syntax is not that hard. 10 year old kids were able to pick it up in less than 3 hours! May be you need to unlearn.”

Here we describe our experiences of teaching kids and learning about learning from kids.

It all started with our Fast Trackers Workshop. We had a student from 1st PUC (11th standard) attending this program. We found him to be self-motivated, sharp and he picked up concepts as easily as the engineering students.

This got us wondering. If school students can learn programming, can we try with students of a younger age. What is the age at which students “get” programming? Is programming everyone’s cup of tea? Should we teach programming to everyone? When I asked these questions, Shreelakshmi told that she can help. Shreelakshmi used to run her startup in Mangaluru and as a part of this, used to teach in a school in Mangaluru. So we decided to run an experiment in her school.

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The Jnaapti Journey – Meetup Stories

It was 2014, and Shreelakshmi had just moved to Bangalore. She had just assumed her new role as “Head of Training & Operations” at jnaapti in February 2014. One of her goals was to bring more visibility to jnaapti. This is an account of her experience of growing a community with technical meetup sessions.

Shreelakshmi’s memories go back to the days when jnaapti was still a single person organization and was hardly known in the community. jnaapti grew to be a four member team in early 2014. It was during this phase that jnaapti was taking baby steps towards a bigger future that we are living in today.

We brainstormed on how to make people around us know jnaapti and the work we do. We started looking for various ways to conduct events which will help spread our learning philosophies. That is when we came across the site Meetup.com.

The First Meetup

They say the first step is always the hardest and so it was with our meetup journey as well.

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The Story of Engineering Education in India

During the last 2 years of Jnaapti’s functioning, we have faced a lot of criticism from many of the stake-holders in this field. And we are not surprised.

This is an account of why this is so, and why Jnaapti functions the way it functions.

My intention of writing this post is to only help parents and students make an informed decision about their careers and make better choices for themselves.

People have criticized us and will continue to criticize us because they have a certain mindset when looking at the success of the IT industry over the last decade.

We have been approached by many parents when their sons/daughters are in the final year of Engineering hoping that we can get their children a job. They say, “My son just finished his Engineering and is now looking for a job. I believe that you can get him one?”. And it hurts us that we can’t help most of them because of the sheer lack of quality. In a lot of ways we feel that these people have been duped. If someone had done this outside the context of an Engineering degree, such institutions would have been forced to close and the people behind this would have been taken to the courts.

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