About the project
Teaching code to people starting from zero
I taught JavaScript, SQL and web development at a French non-profit that helps adults rebuild their professional path through digital skills. The learners came from very different backgrounds, and most of them were opening a code editor for the first time.
The Challenge
A course for people who never wrote a line of code
Most learners had never written a line of code. A course built for computer science students would have lost them in the first hour, so every concept had to be practical and build confidence quickly.
SQL is a good example. Explained as a query language, it sounds abstract. Explained as asking a very literal librarian for exactly the books you want, it clicks.
HOW WE FIX ISSUES
What I taught, and how
- Web development foundations: how a page is built and served, HTML and CSS.
- JavaScript: variables, functions and events, through small exercises learners could see working in the browser.
- SQL: reading and filtering data, then joining tables, with everyday examples before the technical vocabulary.
Teaching beginners is the best training there is for explaining complex systems simply. I still use it every week with business teams on product data projects, where the question is rarely the tool and almost always "what does this field really mean?".
If you are on the other side of that conversation, PIM vs MDM is a good example of a complex topic explained from scratch.
