Code in Place

Code in Place 2025 has ended. I participated as a Section Leader, tutoring a small group of beginner programmers through learning basic coding in Python. We covered fundamental programming - variables and loops and conditionals and data-structures, and used them to cajole small on-screen robots into moving around and performing tasks, and to draw some graphics with lines and filled shapes.

The course was open to all, so there were many working members of the public alongside the students. While the course is a redrafting of the famous Stanford CS106A course content, these were not generally computer science students, but instead were studying some other subject, and wanted to add a little bit of programming as an extra skill on the side.

The interesting thing about Code in Place is that it aims to investigate scaling the teaching experience, without falling prey to the usual failure modes of Massive Open-Access Online Courses (MOOCs), of poor feedback on student work and high drop-out rates. They did this by recruiting 4,000 teaching volunteers like me to act as Section Leaders. We guided the 40,000 students through the material in small classes of ~10 students, and provided 1:1 guidance and question answering in forums.

The application for section leader involved some basic competency questions, and an interesting task to record a video of me teaching some basic programming concepts. This all helped me to understand that I need to scale down my expectations of what is "self-evident", reminding me that beginners need to be taught from the beginning.

While AI was used, it was in a thoughtful, advisory capacity. For students, providing explinations of terse technical errors in their own code, and giving feedback on successfully completed tasks, to improve their solutions.

Once the classes started, I heard complaints in the teachers' forums that other classes suffered from some absenteeism, or students simply not doing the work. But my students were absolutely fabulous, reliably showing up on time, doing all the exercises, and engaging honestly and curiously in the classes. I think that students were sorted into age groups that tend to be not too dissimilar to their Section Leader, so perhaps I had an older-than-average cohort, which might partly explain how I got so lucky.

Regardless of how it happened, it was a thrillingly rewarding experience, seeing people rapidly grow their abilities, and become confident where they had originally been fearful. I'm already looking forward to next year's course!