Tech beat: coding campus follow-up

Elizabeth Suggs | Staff Writer

 

Coding Campus, a company that recently partnered with the community and Continuing Education Department at UVU, gives students and non-students alike the opportunity to partake in computer science.

A previous article about coding campus said both grants and scholarships for UVU will be made available by April. According to Sariah Masterson, program director, grants and scholarships should be made available by May.

“Anyone part of the community can get involved,” said Masterson.

However, while many may see this as a way out of obtaining a degree, Professor Curtis Welborn and Professor Roger DeBry, part of the computer science program at UVU, explain why it isn’t.

To encompass how he felt, Professor Welborn opened with a quote by Albert Einstein, “Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind.”

What he meant by this was that a boot camp may help enable a better understanding of the computer programming field, but it could never replace a student’s experience with a college education.

“College education is not only the bigger picture of computer science, but it’s the kids who take math, who take history, who take all these things that broaden their minds,” said DeBry.

Coding Campus, like many other computer science boot camps, is meant to be a quick course about the computer science field. As a 12-week program, the boot-camp offers web development and web applications through programming with HTML, CSS and Javascript.

In a survey conducted by Welborn, out of 13 alumni and 53 undergraduates, 12 alumni and 33 undergraduates were self-taught in web or mobile application development.

To Welborn, this is because students have, or had, taken the most out of their college education.

“Computer science isn’t just a program,” said Welborn. “It’s about teaching students to learn how to learn.”