The information in this syllabus is vital to your success in the Prep Course and the main curriculum, so please read it carefully.
The App Academy program is very fast-paced. If you don't have a certain level of familiarity with programming in Ruby when you start the course (usually 60-100hrs of practice), you will be playing catch-up for the entire program. Some students can pull this off, but most can't, and several students have had to leave the program as a result.
For this reason, we created this short, part-time prep course covering the fundamentals of Ruby programming. Its purpose is to make sure everyone is up-to-speed on day 1 so that we can hit the ground running. You will need to complete and submit your work by the Wednesday before your cohort begins.
This course is designed to be completed part-time over a 4-week span. It should require 15-20 hours a week for 4 weeks to complete, with approximately 2-3 hours of readings and exercises each day.
Ideally, you will complete this in the 4-weeknights-for-4-weeks schedule we have designed, but we recognize that many of your schedules do not look like this. Whatever your schedule, be sure to follow the daily workflow for each discrete day of the curriculum, whether you spread it out over multiple sessions or crush through 2 or 3 days at a time.
You will be required to submit your completed prepwork by the Wednesday
before your cohort begins. Once you are finished, please zip up the
files. This should include your résumé! Make sure your résumé is
in the w4/resume directory, then navigate to the top-level
appacademy-prep directory and run zip -r your_name.zip w1 w2 w3 w4
in the terminal. Please replace "your name" with your actual name.
Download that file and send it in to admin@appacademy.io with the
subject line completed prepwork.
NB: If you've been conditionally accepted, you must submit the prep work to us before you can schedule your final interview! No need to include your résumé.
Once your cohort begins, we will give assessments throughout the course. Some will test you on material from the prep-course, so be prepared. Students can be dismissed for failing more than one assessment. On the first day of class you will take a preliminary assessment; it will not count against you if you fail it, but you should use it to assess your own understanding of the material and to help prepare for future assessments.
All right, let's get to it!
- Make sure your environment is set up correctly.
- Familiarize yourself with the daily workflow.
- Read all the Week 0 readings before starting the coursework.
- And get started on Week 1!
- Once you've submitted all your prep work, take a look at these suggestions on how to further prepare yourself for the cohort.
If you'd like to get some help or talk things over with your classmates and TAs, refer to the additional resources below.
You can use these platforms to discuss the prep work with your classmates. You're all working on the material together, so when you're struggling with something, your fellows can be an invaluable resource. The reverse also holds: sometimes you'll be the one who understands a concept that someone else is having trouble with. You're encouraged to try to explain it, as this is a great learning opportunity for both you and the other student.
Piazza is a question-and-answer forum geared toward classrooms. This is your primary place to seek help, whether from App Academy TAs or fellow students who have already struggled through the problem you're stuck on. Someone will have an answer.
Slack is a chat client similar to IRC. It supports public and private channels, direct messages, formatted code blocks, and more. You should have received an invite to join the App Academy Prep Slack Team. If you did not receive an invite, please email admin@appacademy.io and we will add you. You should either install the desktop client, or bookmark the web version.
You can type code snippets by surrounding text in `backticks`. You
can also open and close multi-line code blocks like this:
```
# your code goes here
```
App Academy runs a separate code tutoring program and some students have found it helpful to take sessions with us. Our tutors can help you if you get stuck with the prep work. We want to stress that tutoring is not required to complete the prep work.
Because we don't have the bandwidth to help everyone 1-on-1 during the prep work, we do have to charge for the service. Some students have found it helpful in the past and we want to give you the option.
You can sign up here.