Welcome to App Academy Prep! This course is designed to be completed part-time, online, while you are employed, and should take four weeks to complete. The course will take 15-20 hours a week; it will cover the fundamentals of Ruby programming. TAs will hold office hours on Monday-Thursday evenings; during that time, you have their undivided attention. Take advantage of this resource and ask questions!
During App Academy Prep, we will ask you to give feedback on your experience completing the project. You'll be asked to evaluate your performance and understanding, as well as your interactions with the instructional staff. We will also collect similar data during the course. Your feedback helps us to improve the course and keep track of how well people are keeping up with the material.
App Academy Prep will span four weeks. You will be expected to do readings and complete coding exercises each weeknight. We expect this work to take about 2-3 hours for most students. During office hours (6pm-8pm PDT), TAs will be available on the App Academy Slack organization to take questions and provide assistance.
After going through the preparatory curriculum, students will take Assessment 0, a sort of "dry run" of the assessments we will administer throughout the course (nicknamed a01 through a06). We use the assessment results to identify students who have fallen behind, and for whom App Academy may not be the best environment. Your a00 performance won't be used as a criterion to single out or dismiss you; but you can expect it to paint a reliable picture of the difficulty of the class. If you want to prepare yourself to start App Academy on the right foot (and you should), then plan to re-take the assessment on your own until you feel comfortable with the material and can complete it well within the time limit.