I'm a student at Epitech, 42 it's a fork of Epitech. They have almost the same program. I love the school methodology it teaches you that grades are not important and that learning is your responsability. I think the conventional system teaches students to be insecure persons that are always looking for validation from authority figures.
In this type of system you learn how to search knowledge it changes the pasive role of the student into an active role. Also you learn that healping others and teaching them is good for everyone and never a waste of time. I think the school works really well and one would need to measure the succes of their students in the happiness and sense of acomplishment they have.
The school is not a factory producing identical products. It's a human journey of knowledge seeking and personal developement and everyone developes diferently. At times it's very intensive and people that are not really passionate and motivated drop out.
As an example of what we do this year the first project we worked on was to recode the malloc function in c. To do this we have some videos explaining the basics as well as some introductory excercises. After some research i found that the projects at harvard cs61 are very similar to what we will be doing in the unix module so i used the book they recomend there Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective. I read the relevant section and afterwards i coded a lovely implemenation of malloc. I finished in time the project. Some times it is more dificult, for example for the assambler module i found that it is more dificult to find good explanations online. But this time another student explained some key things and afterwards i was coding in intel assembly.
The most dificult information to come by is with respect to parsing and compiler theory or coding in Ocaml. Sometimes i think that if i had a teacher which was an expert in the field this sort of thing would be easy. But the truth is that learning is a personal journey and no one will solve it for us. Education needs to evolve to generate mature people that study and learn because they find that doing so fulfils them and not because they are searching for validation or an external reward waiting for someone to clasify and rank them. Clasification and ranks are subjective and are only means and not ends.
I like your description of your journey through school but your anecdote is a bit odd:
> As an example of what we do this year the first project we worked on was to recode the malloc function in c [...] after some research i found that the projects at harvard cs61 are very similar [...] so i used the book they recomend there Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective. I read the relevant section
So you used the materials put together by the teacher responsible of CS61 at Harvard, and you read the book recommended to the class
You say Epitech and 42 are similar and it describe 42 as: "This French tech school has no teachers, no books, no tuition"
Yet to succeed in that case you used the Harvard teacher information(maybe some lecture notes, slides?) and read a book.(borrowed from the library? or 'found' a pdf online)
Also on a side note: you had to be able to read and understand that book so your English level had to be at a good working level, level that you do not really have when you're straight out of French high school, does 42 expect their students to be proficient in English?
I think it's a great initiative! It might work, it might fail, but at least it is trying!
I hope they will manage to produce well rounded graduates, and not just monkey coders.
> France already has a reputation for creating great engineers (in software as well as in many other fields).
Engineering schools[1] however have a lot of teachers, students have more than 35 hours of class a week. The tuitions are already very low compared to US schools (and there is already no books).
Their process is a lot different from what École 42 tries to do.
In my opinion the goal (as with Epita/Epitech) is to produce monkey coders. What is at least sure, is that these school give a very limited background in cs theory, which is very difficult to overcome to go beyond the monkey coder stage.
Because of the shortage of coders, big french consulting companies (Atos, Cap Gemini, ...) hire since decades graduates from every domain more or less related to science/technology and give them a six months training (in the best case) before sending them to the clients.
So I'm not that surprised that such a school will be successful as long there is a coder shortage. When the next bubble blows, these graduates will probably be the first to be layed off.
If you select the very best few, you could get them into an empty barn, or have them walk the Appalachian Trail or whatever and the "school" will have great success measured by what the smart motivated students accomplished.
Actually I don't think it's harder to get into than Harvard. They have many, many applicants because they don't put any restriction. You can apply even if you didn't go to high school.
Also, they have no tuition but neither do the public universities in France ("Grandes Écoles"), and the most selective and prestigious schools are public. So while the "no tuition" thing is impressive for a private school and may sound like a dream for Americans, it's not really rare in France considering the choice you have with public schools.
a) how well do they learn things and understand the deeper principals such that their understandings generalize?
B) what do they end up learning/creating? Is it like the mit media lab where they're encouraged to innovate 5-10 years out, or are they building stuff that's existed for a long time like Ray tracing?
C) if everything is team based, do the smarter/type a ppl end up doing all the work or does everyone contribute equally enough to learn?
D) is there any kind of mentorship? The stuff I've learned from my mentors across school was never what was being assigned in class; understanding that there are things that you would never think of as entire fields needs guidance for the not yet educated
Sounds like a cool concept for self starters however.
As koolkat said, 42 is a fork of Epitech. In those schools, programming is taught by projects, and supervised by teaching assistants. The teaching assistants are older students selected by their CS knowledge and their human abilities.
This method is preferred by the school because a TA costs less than a real teacher ; and preferred by students because the TA have a closer relationship with them and have a better understanding of the projects (they coded this project 1 or 2 years before).
Personally, I was head of the teaching assistants in EPITA for 1 year. EPITA follows the same principles of projects and teaching assistants. We were a team of 30 students and lead the projects for approx. 300 students.
I think it is fantastic to make many programming hours during your education.
However, I am wondering if these students would learn the computer science fundamentals which are usually found in more or less dry books. Programming analysis, logic, fundamentals of programming language implementation etcetera. You can't say: look on the internet and find the relevant papers in all those fields and synthesize the theory by yourselves. That would be highly inefficient, a problem we tackle with education.
If you make the comparison to Harvard you aim for more than educating people to become good/ exceptionally effective developers in my understanding.
It is an interesting idea to see if forgoing formal learning through tutoring, reading material, and textbooks; and learning through team collaboration and a lot of practice would work.
Like others on the thread, my hunch is that there will be a small group of self-driven students who will teach themselves using the same formal education methods: replicating the courses given in other universities, reading textbooks/papers/research, researching online, and watching MOOC style videos.
This group will end up teaching the others in their class through project collaboration. But unless everyone in the class is self-driven, the result would be a couple of successful self-taught developers, and a whole lot of below average ones.
You're right, they don't ( i've interviewed people from the epitech, which was created by the same people). That's the one big shortcoming of the curriculum. They're claiming to teach the next zuckerberg or page, but they forgot that those two people have a strong general scientific background.
Yet, they do create people that are truely amazing at coding.
The project looks awesome obviously. What you need to know out of the context with it's director (Xavier Niel), is the guy is an ace of communication.
Looking a little more into details and feedbacks from people who did the school, it's a VERY different story. I would highly doubt anything that comes to the communication about 42.
Probably the vision is achievable, I'm not sure it is by this school.
Xavier Niel is the founder, not the director. He donated money for it.
He's one of the only french businessmen having actually disturbed anything in France, a country where "innovation" is usually driven by publicly owned big companies and public grants. He has driven telecommunication prices down dramatically with his internet provider company, and then his mobile phone carrier. Internet is cheap in France mainly thanks to him.
I trust him probably more than anybody else in France to actually achieve something disturbing the system in place, precisely because he's one of the very very few that has done it before and he does not come from the elite making system of "grandes écoles".
Amusing fact, he started his fortune with sex messaging newtorks on the french precursor of internet, the Minitel.
> Looking a little more into details and feedbacks from people who did the school, it's a VERY different story.
I'm curious to know where are those people who came out of42. The school opened like 4 years ago right? So the first graduates must have been last year.
I once tried to find interns for my startup at Epitech (42 is a copy of Epitech).
Their level in mathematics was abysmal. I mean they didn't even understand how to use basic trigonometric functions.
There is a very good reason if the best engineering schools in France only admit students after a 2 years curriculum of pure math/physics/chemistry.
I have quite a few friends in Paris who have also told me that 42 is good at teaching most standard CS concepts but they were definitely not a good choice for "mathematical" projects.
Nothing revolutionary at all, its manager (Nicolas Sadirac) had created EPITECH in 1999 (I did this school). The program is exactly the same. The only things which change is that Ecole 42 is free and takes only the 3 firsts years of EPITECH instead of 5.
The story that Xavier Niel (school founder) is trying to tell is that there are many bright students that didn't fit in the traditional/oldish education system, but they could reach their full potential in this new school.
I don't buy it. First, there's a large panel of CS formations in France, most of them virtually free. It goes from highly selective schools "grandes écoles", to universities or undergraduate programs that anyone with a high-school diploma can attend. There's room for many different student profiles there.
Then, I don't see why it would be such a progress to get rid of the teachers and the books, are they that bad that they prevent the students from improving?
> The students are given little direction about how to solve the problems, so they have to turn to each other — and to the Internet — to figure out the solutions.
Usually, this is what professors do when they are too lazy to cook up a real project.
Your comment made me realize that for instance at ENS (one of the French topmost Grande École) we had professors but the courses were focusing on theory, and for example there is no courses on a programming languages (there is a compiler / programming language course, but it is focused on the theoretical aspects of things, what I mean is that there is no C or C++ or Python course, you are just supposed to pick it up yourself if you need it).
Meanwhile, we also had projects that we had to figure out by ourselves. For instance in the first semester of the first year, there is a course that explains theoretical stuffs that are supposed to have a relation with hardware (like 2-adic numbers [1]). The project for this course consists in programming a watch that displays time. But we have to program the watch in an assembly language that we have designed ourselves. And that asm has to execute on a processor that we have designed ourselves. And we have to write the processor code in a hardware/netlist language that we have to design ourselves. And we have to write ourselves the interpreter we will use for that netlist language.
That was what we were told to do, with no additional instructions. Some students learned C by themselves for that, some other C++, some other OCaml… And all of them learned or reinvented how to design memories, or a CPU (for instance, me and a friend decided to invent a single-instruction processor, just for the fun, we got it working but it was rather slow compared to other who decided for instance to learn how to implement a simplified MIPS).
All this to say that there is absolutely no incompatibility between having professors and teaching (partly) by projects.
This is a fantastic initiative, and like a lot of businesses built by Xavier Niel, I hope it leads to positive changes in the industry.
This said, what I would be worried about with this system is how long it will take for the employment market to adapt to this/those schools. When it comes to jobs, French companies, especially large ones, have a really strong bias towards applicants from well known and somewhat elitist public schools, no matter how efficient those might actually be at their jobs.
Unlike the US, France doesn't really have a strong and major software industry competing for raw programming talent, so developers have nowhere near the salary, status, or lifestyle they could expect in places like SV or NY. Very few companies have a real incentive to hire a great programmer over a good one, which might reduce the efficiency of a school that focuses on training very good developers without giving them the access to the prestige of the (also free) traditional public schools.
It will be interesting to see how salaries and career paths available to programmers trained at École 42 will compare with those hired after they graduate from École Centrale Paris.
Nevertheless, I look forward to hire from this talent pool.
> French companies, especially large ones, have a really strong bias towards applicants from well known and somewhat elitist public schools,
Not only French companies, but also banks, hedge funds, companies like Google and so on...
I was saying that in an other comment, but recently Google Paris organized a programming contest. All teams in the top ten came from top schools (mainly ENS, but also ECP and X) whereas 42 performed extremely poorly.
There's a reason why employers are biased towards elite schools.
FWIW I have heard terrible things from people studying there. While it looks good on paper, the sad reality is that it's basically a code monkey factory. Also, I don't really think that this kind of trade school are relevant in France where access to education is low.
Seems like another initiative to disrupt the traditional model <good university> -> <good job>, after the MOOCs and soon Star Fighter.
I think it's a good thing to disrupt prestigious universities that hire on credentials, but France is not exactly the country for that since education is mostly free and admissions (at least in engineering schools) tries to be more meritocratic.
EDIT: disclaimer: I did an engineering school in France.
It sounds very novel and interesting, but for me for example I know I need _some_ structure to learn something. It doesn't have to be a formal university degree structure, but some kind of arrangement of material, mentorship, progress tracking, experience sharing, feedback, etc. is necessary for me.
I kind of doubt that giving a person with no programming/CS experience Google and a task like "write a concurrent distributed high-performance database system" would lead to a good outcome. There is a lot of trade lore, experience, knowledge of what works and what doesn't, etc. which is better passed by a teacher in an carefully constructed narrative than by random discovery by an uninitiated person.
But it is interesting to see what comes out of it, maybe they prove me wrong.
ITT: French people busy scornfully labelling technically proficient Epitech/42 programmers as "code monkeys" (just ctrl-f for monkey). Meanwhile hackers in the US are too busy building things to care what other people call them. Makes me glad I moved over.
It's weird, Ive worked with a few people from Epitech. They say the same thing about software engineering in France, but they are some of the best developers I've had the privilege to work with. If it drives them to work over here, then glad to have 'em!
I did the online tests (which were pretty difficult, a lot of logic), and I was admitted to get in to do some additional testing.
It's in Paris, and the cost of living there is astronomic. Thanks but no thanks.
On top of that, what's the point of taking the smartest young individuals and teaching them how to be engineers ? It's elitist. I agree that the fact that it being free is great, but to me, those students would have been great programmers without that school.
It's easy teaching kids who already know almost everything.
Not the smartest, those who are born2code.
The selection is here to separate those who can deal with the teaching system of the school from those who can't.
The cool part is that there is no other requirements, you don't have to pay 8k per year for the school like students of other schools have to, and you get better results than public schools.
The only programming experience i had before 42 was some html/css (far from knowing everything), i could barely do a static website (and i'm not young either, i am 27years old), there is no way i would have learn so much (c, php/js/mysql, assembler, ruby on rails, using docker) all by myself with no guidance at all and absolutly no idea where to start.
Being in 42 gives us the motivation, alone at home with a slower learning, not so easy.
Yes living in paris is expensive, but if you live in the suburb, maybe part-time work for some people (no deadlines means you can actually work if you want or need it), you can manage it, it's just 3years, with a 6months internship during the first year (you can be paid) and a third year with possible sandwich course if you need it.
hey, i'm a student of 42, would like to clarify a few things.
About the teaching assistants : we do have a few students helping the pedago team, but they aren't TA, they are in the "bocal" to help the team in place to create new projetcs, maintain the school servers and the intranet, that sort of things. Except if you encounter a bug or if there is something wrong with a subject or some hardware you are not suppose to expect any help from them, at all.
Yes 42 is a bit of a fork of epitech, but they don't have the same program anymore, the basic program is the same (projects for the beginner) but new projetcs are totally new, and students are encourage to create new projetcs too (we actually have some, like a project including docker, a student is preparing a OcamL pool etc...).
"All of École 42’s projects are meant to be collaborative, so the students work in teams of two to five people"
This is not true, the main concept of the school is the peer learning, you are not suppose to do solo projects with other peoples, you are suppose to learn how to do the project with other people, this is actually a different concept, we do have group projects though but it's a minority.
[+] [-] koolkat|11 years ago|reply
In this type of system you learn how to search knowledge it changes the pasive role of the student into an active role. Also you learn that healping others and teaching them is good for everyone and never a waste of time. I think the school works really well and one would need to measure the succes of their students in the happiness and sense of acomplishment they have.
The school is not a factory producing identical products. It's a human journey of knowledge seeking and personal developement and everyone developes diferently. At times it's very intensive and people that are not really passionate and motivated drop out.
As an example of what we do this year the first project we worked on was to recode the malloc function in c. To do this we have some videos explaining the basics as well as some introductory excercises. After some research i found that the projects at harvard cs61 are very similar to what we will be doing in the unix module so i used the book they recomend there Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective. I read the relevant section and afterwards i coded a lovely implemenation of malloc. I finished in time the project. Some times it is more dificult, for example for the assambler module i found that it is more dificult to find good explanations online. But this time another student explained some key things and afterwards i was coding in intel assembly.
The most dificult information to come by is with respect to parsing and compiler theory or coding in Ocaml. Sometimes i think that if i had a teacher which was an expert in the field this sort of thing would be easy. But the truth is that learning is a personal journey and no one will solve it for us. Education needs to evolve to generate mature people that study and learn because they find that doing so fulfils them and not because they are searching for validation or an external reward waiting for someone to clasify and rank them. Clasification and ranks are subjective and are only means and not ends.
[+] [-] vmarsy|11 years ago|reply
> As an example of what we do this year the first project we worked on was to recode the malloc function in c [...] after some research i found that the projects at harvard cs61 are very similar [...] so i used the book they recomend there Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective. I read the relevant section
So you used the materials put together by the teacher responsible of CS61 at Harvard, and you read the book recommended to the class
You say Epitech and 42 are similar and it describe 42 as: "This French tech school has no teachers, no books, no tuition"
Yet to succeed in that case you used the Harvard teacher information(maybe some lecture notes, slides?) and read a book.(borrowed from the library? or 'found' a pdf online)
Also on a side note: you had to be able to read and understand that book so your English level had to be at a good working level, level that you do not really have when you're straight out of French high school, does 42 expect their students to be proficient in English?
[+] [-] stephenbez|11 years ago|reply
Here are the lecture notes: https://courses.engr.illinois.edu/cs421/fa2014/lectures/inde...
Hope they might be helpful to you.
[+] [-] vmarsy|11 years ago|reply
> France already has a reputation for creating great engineers (in software as well as in many other fields).
Engineering schools[1] however have a lot of teachers, students have more than 35 hours of class a week. The tuitions are already very low compared to US schools (and there is already no books). Their process is a lot different from what École 42 tries to do.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandes_%C3%A9coles#List_of_gra...
[+] [-] djulius|11 years ago|reply
Because of the shortage of coders, big french consulting companies (Atos, Cap Gemini, ...) hire since decades graduates from every domain more or less related to science/technology and give them a six months training (in the best case) before sending them to the clients.
So I'm not that surprised that such a school will be successful as long there is a coder shortage. When the next bubble blows, these graduates will probably be the first to be layed off.
[+] [-] lazyant|11 years ago|reply
If you select the very best few, you could get them into an empty barn, or have them walk the Appalachian Trail or whatever and the "school" will have great success measured by what the smart motivated students accomplished.
[+] [-] eloisant|11 years ago|reply
Also, they have no tuition but neither do the public universities in France ("Grandes Écoles"), and the most selective and prestigious schools are public. So while the "no tuition" thing is impressive for a private school and may sound like a dream for Americans, it's not really rare in France considering the choice you have with public schools.
Finally, not really related to the way they teach there, but here's the director (same guy in the picture on the article) spanking a girl in a classroom during off-hours (nsfw). http://www.19h59.com/WTF/10238_Le-directeur-de-lecole-42-don...
[+] [-] azinman2|11 years ago|reply
The question to me is
a) how well do they learn things and understand the deeper principals such that their understandings generalize?
B) what do they end up learning/creating? Is it like the mit media lab where they're encouraged to innovate 5-10 years out, or are they building stuff that's existed for a long time like Ray tracing?
C) if everything is team based, do the smarter/type a ppl end up doing all the work or does everyone contribute equally enough to learn?
D) is there any kind of mentorship? The stuff I've learned from my mentors across school was never what was being assigned in class; understanding that there are things that you would never think of as entire fields needs guidance for the not yet educated
Sounds like a cool concept for self starters however.
[+] [-] pol0nium|11 years ago|reply
As koolkat said, 42 is a fork of Epitech. In those schools, programming is taught by projects, and supervised by teaching assistants. The teaching assistants are older students selected by their CS knowledge and their human abilities.
This method is preferred by the school because a TA costs less than a real teacher ; and preferred by students because the TA have a closer relationship with them and have a better understanding of the projects (they coded this project 1 or 2 years before).
Personally, I was head of the teaching assistants in EPITA for 1 year. EPITA follows the same principles of projects and teaching assistants. We were a team of 30 students and lead the projects for approx. 300 students.
[+] [-] dang|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zipeldiablo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exceptione|11 years ago|reply
However, I am wondering if these students would learn the computer science fundamentals which are usually found in more or less dry books. Programming analysis, logic, fundamentals of programming language implementation etcetera. You can't say: look on the internet and find the relevant papers in all those fields and synthesize the theory by yourselves. That would be highly inefficient, a problem we tackle with education. If you make the comparison to Harvard you aim for more than educating people to become good/ exceptionally effective developers in my understanding.
[+] [-] abetaha|11 years ago|reply
Like others on the thread, my hunch is that there will be a small group of self-driven students who will teach themselves using the same formal education methods: replicating the courses given in other universities, reading textbooks/papers/research, researching online, and watching MOOC style videos.
This group will end up teaching the others in their class through project collaboration. But unless everyone in the class is self-driven, the result would be a couple of successful self-taught developers, and a whole lot of below average ones.
[+] [-] bsaul|11 years ago|reply
Yet, they do create people that are truely amazing at coding.
[+] [-] Dralon|11 years ago|reply
The project looks awesome obviously. What you need to know out of the context with it's director (Xavier Niel), is the guy is an ace of communication.
Looking a little more into details and feedbacks from people who did the school, it's a VERY different story. I would highly doubt anything that comes to the communication about 42.
Probably the vision is achievable, I'm not sure it is by this school.
[+] [-] erispoe|11 years ago|reply
He's one of the only french businessmen having actually disturbed anything in France, a country where "innovation" is usually driven by publicly owned big companies and public grants. He has driven telecommunication prices down dramatically with his internet provider company, and then his mobile phone carrier. Internet is cheap in France mainly thanks to him.
I trust him probably more than anybody else in France to actually achieve something disturbing the system in place, precisely because he's one of the very very few that has done it before and he does not come from the elite making system of "grandes écoles".
Amusing fact, he started his fortune with sex messaging newtorks on the french precursor of internet, the Minitel.
[+] [-] baby|11 years ago|reply
I'm curious to know where are those people who came out of42. The school opened like 4 years ago right? So the first graduates must have been last year.
If you have any stories to share I'm curious :)
[+] [-] hme|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sebgr|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GhiGt|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yodsanklai|11 years ago|reply
https://sites.google.com/site/hashcode2015/results
[+] [-] yodsanklai|11 years ago|reply
I don't buy it. First, there's a large panel of CS formations in France, most of them virtually free. It goes from highly selective schools "grandes écoles", to universities or undergraduate programs that anyone with a high-school diploma can attend. There's room for many different student profiles there.
Then, I don't see why it would be such a progress to get rid of the teachers and the books, are they that bad that they prevent the students from improving?
> The students are given little direction about how to solve the problems, so they have to turn to each other — and to the Internet — to figure out the solutions.
Usually, this is what professors do when they are too lazy to cook up a real project.
[+] [-] p4bl0|11 years ago|reply
Meanwhile, we also had projects that we had to figure out by ourselves. For instance in the first semester of the first year, there is a course that explains theoretical stuffs that are supposed to have a relation with hardware (like 2-adic numbers [1]). The project for this course consists in programming a watch that displays time. But we have to program the watch in an assembly language that we have designed ourselves. And that asm has to execute on a processor that we have designed ourselves. And we have to write the processor code in a hardware/netlist language that we have to design ourselves. And we have to write ourselves the interpreter we will use for that netlist language.
That was what we were told to do, with no additional instructions. Some students learned C by themselves for that, some other C++, some other OCaml… And all of them learned or reinvented how to design memories, or a CPU (for instance, me and a friend decided to invent a single-instruction processor, just for the fun, we got it working but it was rather slow compared to other who decided for instance to learn how to implement a simplified MIPS).
All this to say that there is absolutely no incompatibility between having professors and teaching (partly) by projects.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-adic_number
[+] [-] uniclaude|11 years ago|reply
This said, what I would be worried about with this system is how long it will take for the employment market to adapt to this/those schools. When it comes to jobs, French companies, especially large ones, have a really strong bias towards applicants from well known and somewhat elitist public schools, no matter how efficient those might actually be at their jobs.
Unlike the US, France doesn't really have a strong and major software industry competing for raw programming talent, so developers have nowhere near the salary, status, or lifestyle they could expect in places like SV or NY. Very few companies have a real incentive to hire a great programmer over a good one, which might reduce the efficiency of a school that focuses on training very good developers without giving them the access to the prestige of the (also free) traditional public schools.
It will be interesting to see how salaries and career paths available to programmers trained at École 42 will compare with those hired after they graduate from École Centrale Paris.
Nevertheless, I look forward to hire from this talent pool.
[+] [-] yodsanklai|11 years ago|reply
Not only French companies, but also banks, hedge funds, companies like Google and so on...
I was saying that in an other comment, but recently Google Paris organized a programming contest. All teams in the top ten came from top schools (mainly ENS, but also ECP and X) whereas 42 performed extremely poorly.
There's a reason why employers are biased towards elite schools.
[+] [-] r0naa|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] S4M|11 years ago|reply
I think it's a good thing to disrupt prestigious universities that hire on credentials, but France is not exactly the country for that since education is mostly free and admissions (at least in engineering schools) tries to be more meritocratic.
EDIT: disclaimer: I did an engineering school in France.
[+] [-] smsm42|11 years ago|reply
I kind of doubt that giving a person with no programming/CS experience Google and a task like "write a concurrent distributed high-performance database system" would lead to a good outcome. There is a lot of trade lore, experience, knowledge of what works and what doesn't, etc. which is better passed by a teacher in an carefully constructed narrative than by random discovery by an uninitiated person.
But it is interesting to see what comes out of it, maybe they prove me wrong.
[+] [-] Mitsu0|11 years ago|reply
There is (more or less) all that in 42, thanks to the "peer to peer" approach.
[+] [-] peferron|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perishabledave|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jokoon|11 years ago|reply
It's in Paris, and the cost of living there is astronomic. Thanks but no thanks.
On top of that, what's the point of taking the smartest young individuals and teaching them how to be engineers ? It's elitist. I agree that the fact that it being free is great, but to me, those students would have been great programmers without that school.
It's easy teaching kids who already know almost everything.
[+] [-] zipeldiablo|11 years ago|reply
The only programming experience i had before 42 was some html/css (far from knowing everything), i could barely do a static website (and i'm not young either, i am 27years old), there is no way i would have learn so much (c, php/js/mysql, assembler, ruby on rails, using docker) all by myself with no guidance at all and absolutly no idea where to start. Being in 42 gives us the motivation, alone at home with a slower learning, not so easy.
Yes living in paris is expensive, but if you live in the suburb, maybe part-time work for some people (no deadlines means you can actually work if you want or need it), you can manage it, it's just 3years, with a 6months internship during the first year (you can be paid) and a third year with possible sandwich course if you need it.
[+] [-] tienthanh8490|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pandark|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zipeldiablo|11 years ago|reply
Yes 42 is a bit of a fork of epitech, but they don't have the same program anymore, the basic program is the same (projects for the beginner) but new projetcs are totally new, and students are encourage to create new projetcs too (we actually have some, like a project including docker, a student is preparing a OcamL pool etc...).
"All of École 42’s projects are meant to be collaborative, so the students work in teams of two to five people" This is not true, the main concept of the school is the peer learning, you are not suppose to do solo projects with other peoples, you are suppose to learn how to do the project with other people, this is actually a different concept, we do have group projects though but it's a minority.
[+] [-] PaulGregor|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eva1984|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] userbinator|11 years ago|reply
> Pourquoi 42 s’appelle 42 ?
> On vous met sur la piste… regardez du côté du Guide du voyageur galactique
"Don't Panic" would certainly be an appropriate slogan for a school like this.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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