Our Pedagogy
Results oriented and heavily researched learning curriculum designed for a long-term career as a Software Engineer
Core Curriculum
Mastery of Fundamentals
Duration: 8 - 16+ months
Mastery-based Learning
Capstone
Launch Your Career
Duration: 4 - 7+ months
Instructor-led, Team-based
Everyone has an opinion on the best way to learn or teach. Ask 10 experienced programmers how to learn to program, and you'll get 10 very different answers. Most people, even seasoned experts, are only aware of their personal journey and do not spend any time thinking about how to craft a path to proficiency for someone starting their learning journey today.
Our pedagogy is a result of teaching hundreds of students over half a decade and combining that experience with proven learning methods by experts, such as Barbara Oakley, Carol Dweck, K. Anders Ericsson, Kathy Sierra, Fernand Gobet, Henry Roediger III, and others.
Most of the confusion around how to learn comes from two major points of ambiguity: 1) not knowing what the learner's end goal is and 2) not zooming out enough to see the learning journey in its entirety. The first confusion usually comes from a vague goal (eg, "I want a job"), while the second is usually the result of not being aware of the different phases of learning a skill. In the following paragraphs, we'll outline how our pedagogy addresses these confusions.
First, it should be pointed out that our singular goal at Launch School is to push people to launch new careers at the best companies possible. Importantly and counterintuitively, it's not about jobs at all; launching a career requires a far more long-term mindset and a much more thorough training process - you have to be willing to learn for years instead of months. Second, the entire learning journey is much more nuanced than most people think, and what and how you study depends on where you are on this journey. We will articulate this idea in more detail in the sections below.