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Mod 0 Curriculum

Hi there and welcome!

Over the next few days and weeks, you'll be referring to the instructions and guides on this website as you get ready to begin your time at Turing.

To get the most out of Mod0, we'd like to explain why this website exists at all, and more importantly why you have to finish Mod0 before beginning Turing.

Why the Mod 0 curriculum exists

I'm sure you've picked up on a theme: Turing is hard. The program will consume most of your time and attention for the seven months between starting the first module, and finishing the last module. It could take a bit longer, if you find yourself repeating a module.

When someone has put their life on hold, quit their job, relocated to Denver, and put it all on the line for attending Turing - everyone (that person, Turing staff, their classmates) wants to see them succeed.

For a variety of reasons, historically, not everyone who starts Turing has graduated the program, and this is a brutally difficult experience for that person. They do the work, they put in the effort and time, and... they don't finish the program.

We think anyone can learn software development.

What might explain the disconnect, between

anyone can learn software development

and

not every person who starts Turing graduates from Turing?

A theme among those who have graduated from Turing touches on at least two elements:

  1. A foundation of technical skills: They've been able to poke around the internals of their laptop before they start, or they have a good "mental map" of how files and folders are organized on their computer, or they've had passing experience with git and a code editor and their command line.
  2. Life doesn't clobber them too badly: They have friends and/or family rooting for their success, and are able to avoid some of the more difficult experiences we can experience, like: death of a loved one, illness (their own illness or that of someone they have to care for), etc. Many aspects of this "theme" are obviously entirely outside of everyone's control.

When these two themes work together, Turing students have enough "margin" or "slack" to pour lots of effort into the program, and are usually successful.

When either (or both!) of these themes are missed, it becomes dramatically harder for Turing students to have successful outcomes. It's not impossible, but it is much harder.

Mod0 will speak to both of these themes, to prepare you as much as possible.

Does Mod0 work?

Mod0 exists to set you up for success at Turing. We've been pleased with the results. Since we've started this program, we've had dramatically fewer students repeat the first module. In the past, sometimes as many as 20-30% of the new students would repeat the first module.

After rolling out Mod0, some cohorts have zero students repeating the first module.

This confirms our assessment - anyone can learn to program, but it's important that they're set up for success, learn how to learn, and are prepared as well as we can prepare them.

Mod0 works. The Mod0 instructors are here to help you succeed, so please use all the resources available to you, to learn all you can.

Because we want to see your success in the program, we require you to successfully finish the Mod0 program before the first day of the in-person Turing program.

What will we cover in Mod0?

Over the next few weeks, you'll be learning a lot. Feel free to click through these lessons; some are written lessons that you'll work through with our instructors, others are slide shows that you'll review in real-time with our instructors.

All of these lessons are linked in the sidebar, as well.

  • [First, you'll need to install some software on your laptop, and do some configuration around that]({{ site.baseurl }}{% link setup-instructions.md %})
  • [Session 1: You'll learn about what does success at Turing mean, what strategies you can begin to employ to be successful, keyboard shortcuts, and how to google]({{ site.baseurl }}{% link session1/index.md %})
  • [Session 2: Using your Terminal, git and Github, and how to navigate files and folders in your terminal]({{ site.baseurl }}{% link session2/index.md %})
  • [Session 3: We'll go deeper in Git and Github usage. Git is an amazing and powerful tool, but tricky, and this is time well spent]({{ site.baseurl }}{% link session3/index.md %})
  • [Session 4: Basic principles of software development, like object-oriented principles, top-down design of classes, and breaking a problem into small pieces]({{ site.baseurl }}{% link session4/index.md %})
  • [Session 5: Currently a work in progress]({{ site.baseurl }}{% link session5/index.md %})
  • [Session 6: Synthesis, Professional Development, Mentoring, More Turing Resources]({{ site.baseurl }}{% link session6/index.md %})
  • The capstone! Depending on which program you're doing, we've got a capstone project for you. [Front-end capstone]({{ site.baseurl }}{% link capstone/fe_engineering/index.md %}) [back-end capstone]({{ site.baseurl }}{% link capstone/be_engineering/index.md %})

Next steps

When you're ready to get started, click over to [environment setup instructions]({{ site.baseurl }}{% link setup-instructions.md %}) and start installing!