Crystal City’s Disruption Corporation, on the 10th floor of 2231 Crystal Drive, is planning to play host to a 12-week immersive computer coding class in January.
The “coding bootcamp,” is an academy by The Iron Yard and costs $12,000. It offers three courses: rails engineering, which teaches Ruby on Rails for building “fast, production-quality full-stack apps;” mobile engineering for building iPhone apps; and “front-end engineering” for designing websites.
“Every student will leave the app with a portfolio of a functioning app or a functioning tool,” Campus Director Su Kim told ARLnow.com today.
The academy starts Jan. 5 and it’s taking students now. Each class is capped at 15 students to provide for ample teacher-student interaction, she said. The classes are Monday through Friday from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. The morning session is a “lecture,” with teacher-led instruction while students are live-coding at their computers. The afternoons are lab time, where students can work on their assignments and build their portfolio design.
The final two weeks of the course are devoted strictly to the final product students work on. After the academy is over, The Iron Yard has a career placement system set up to get its graduates jobs as developers in the area. During classes, guest lecturers are brought in from local technology companies and The Iron Yard likes to get a sense for what each community wants out of its developer talent pool.
“We really want the students to meet the needs of the existing community,” Kim said. “The Iron Yard started as an accelerator, but we realized there wasn’t enough talent even for the startups to come out of the accelerator. So the academy launched as kind of accessory.”
In tandem with the bootcamp, The Iron Yard also offers free kids coding classes. For an hour a week, children as young as 7 years old can come and take courses, taught by both the academy’s full-time instructors and by the students in boot camp.
Crystal City is the 10th campus for the Iron Yard bootcamp, following cities like Houston, Atlanta, Austin, Texas and Orlando, Fla. It will be located in Phase II of Disruption Corporation’s headquarters.
Photo courtesy The Iron Yard