Flatiron Taps Partner for High School Coding Camps

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 08/17/15

A for-profit school that teaches adults and high school students programming has standardized on the use of a cloud-based code editor for its pre-college summer camps. Flatiron School, which runs courses in 10 cities across the United States, has been running Nitrous Pro, from Nitrous, as its software development platform.

The organization's pre-college academy classes help train students to become professional software developers. Browser-based Nitrous Pro allows the students to learn and work with GIT, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby, .NET and other languages to create applications.

According to the company, the use of Nitrous has saved teachers between four and six hours of instruction time, which used to be dedicated to teaching students how to maintain an Ubuntu environment on the Chromebooks they were going to be working on. "Now students can get productive in seconds," said Flatiron Dean and Co-Founder Avi Flombaum in a video about the use of the software.
Nitrous is browser-based, allowing students to code from any connected computer.

Teacher Aankit Patel noted that because the platform works in a browser window, students are instantly familiar with it. "So when they go home and have to use a completely different computer, they know exactly how to get back into it and start coding."

Launched in April 2015, Nitrous Pro includes collaboration features that allow students to work on projects jointly with students in other cities and to connect with instructors locally or remotely.

The coding platform has multiple tiers of pricing, from free for a "starter" version to $79 per month for professional projects. Nitrous also offers special education pricing.

"It's simple, it's reliable. It takes all of the headache out of the setup process in getting students coding in a real way in a browser," said Flatiron Product VP Mat Balez.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

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