On the 6th of February 2021, I saw the form to apply either as a student, mentor or an Instructor to the Frontend Foxes FREE 🙅🏻‍♀️💵 Coding Bootcamp on twitter from the Frontend Foxes official twitter account - being a part of this community there was already an awareness being created about this on the slack channel by the founder and I decided to apply, I also stated my experience as an Instructor/Facilitator for the She Code Africa Summer code Camp, 2020. A few days later, I received an email welcoming me aboard and I was to work with 4 other mentors who were to mentor students. I was accorded the opportunity to work with these mentors who were very active during the course of the bootcamp and made sure to attend all classes and pay attention to the students and meet their needs as regards the projects and assignments given during the bootcamp.

Over the next few weeks, Instructors and mentors were guided, meetings were held on recommended methods to teach students, how to grade assignments, platforms we were to use for communication, how to guide students if they sought our help with assignments, different methods to approach this and the most effective methods.

During the start of the program, I was assigned 20 students from the Africa cohort who were all beginners in Web development and mentors were assigned 5 students each, that way they are able to tend to all students and make sure their learning needs are met which I thought was a really good idea and helpful to the students in the long run. Lessons were held twice every week and with office hours which brought it to a total of 3 times a week - these office hours were to be used as mentoring hours or teaching hours - in my case, I used mine for teaching and mentoring students - in cases where students needed to bring forward questions asked during their assignments if they had questions or needed clarifications on certain topics.

The curriculum used during the duration of the program had a total of 7 projects on the topics of HTML, CSS Javascript and frontend library and framework: React, Vue. I also made use of slides created by one the instructors of the bootcamp for the Europe cohort here, the students were also comfortable with the addition of slides during teaching and used it alongside some of the topics in the curriculum. They can be accessed here and you can also gain full access to the projects in the slides on signing up as a part of the self driven cohort which commenced on the 5th of April, 2021.

At the end of the cohort I used my last day which was my office hour to round up on the curriculum and talk to the students about what next to do after the bootcamp such as: working on more personal projects, putting together a portfolio, how to prepare for interviews, how to apply to jobs, what next after the bootcamp.

The reviews I got during and after classes were encouraging and two of the students from the last cohort signed up for the upcoming cohort but this time, as mentors! How cool is that? 😀

Note: This is not a sponsored post.