Code First: Girls are looking for volunteer instructors from the Computer Science student community at Kent to help teach coding to school children on campus. The time commitment would be a few hours one weekday evening for 8 weeks in the Autumn term. The course covers HTML/CSS, GitHub, Twitter Bootstrap, JS and jQuery. All material and structure for the course are provided and instructors will be given training on how to teach the course before it starts. There is no homework to mark and very little time commitment outside of the weekly classes. It’s a fantastic opportunity for students to develop their presentation and public speaking skills, and potentially make a change on young women’s lives by inspiring them to a career in tech.
Code First: Girls – Instructor overview
May 2018
What is Code First: Girls?
● Our aim is to help young women enter tech and entrepreneurship.
● We do this by running free programming courses, as well as other skills and personal development events such as hack your career days, annual conference, and summer hackathons.
● We’re not affiliated to any specific organisation, but often piggyback off university associations.
Our expectations of the instructor/the role:
● Our instructors come from a variety of background, and include undergraduates, post
graduates, working professionals and university lecturers. All instructors work on a voluntary basis.
● We welcome both male and female instructors
● All lesson plans and teaching material are provided
● For our standard courses – 2 hours teaching per week, over 8 weeks, in the evening (usually 6.30-8.30pm). We do also run master-classes and intensive courses which vary in topic and format.
● Instructors are not required to mark any homework, but we do ask that they allow students to contact then if they have any questions about the courses. This is usually done over a Slack channel.
● Instructors also play a role in the student screening process, where instructors choose who will take the course if the course is over-subscribed. Full training is given on how to do this.
● We aim to link all new instructors to previous CF:G instructors for support and advice
● We prefer instructors to commit for two semesters – this allow time to settle, and also helps handover/continuity of knowledge and experience.
● We usually have three to four instructors (dependent on class size), one who is more experienced in teaching to take a lead, and the others to support (usually where the instructor is new, or less experienced in teaching programming). Whilst the lead instructor usually does more teaching, all instructors should feel comfortable with running a class if required.
● Popular languages and skills we cover in our courses include CSS, HTML, Ruby, Python, Heroku,
JavaScript, JQuery.
What instructors gain from the experience:
● An opportunity to bid for any paid work which CFG is asked to fulfill. This might include teaching on our professionals course (for working women, for which a charge is made)
● An opportunity to be part of a 200-strong national network of instructors and programming professionals
● An invitation to our annual conference (held in the autumn)
● An invitation to our annual summer party (for the past few years held at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, this is a great networking event where instructors can meet each other, members of the CFG community and our corporate sponsors)
● An opportunity to develop your presenting and teaching skills
● A strongly linked student and corporate network, where we pass on any opportunities to speak, teach, jobs etc. to our instructors
● We are happy to provide references
Instructor Syllabus (summary) HTML CSS 2018.docx (2) (1) (1)
If you would like to know more or be considered for an instructor role please email your cv with
two references (including one at your current place of employment if you have one) with a short introduction to programmes@codefirstgirls.org.uk
You can find out more on Code First Girls at www.codefirstgirls.org.uk