MakeGamesWithUs (YC W12) is now MakeSchool, building an alternative CS degree | Hacker News Reader

MakeGamesWithUs (YC W12) is now MakeSchool, building an alternative CS degree

makeschool.com

63 pointsDesaiAshu32 comments

What a bummer that the tuition for this is still $30k for a year. I just can't imagine that $30k/year is a sustainable economic model for higher education. Especially in the technical arena, you can become proficient enough to get a junior-level engineering job pretty easily. Definitely for a lot cheaper than $30k.

I say this as a self-taught engineer - never went to college, and I've now got a pretty great software engineering job. Dropping $30k for a year of training (or, even worse, $30k/year for 4 years!) would have been a huge waste.

I agree. I'm in a similar situation, except I attended a hacker school in Chicago for some exposure. I got some great work experience and it got me a job -- and my tuition was just $3000. I guess this is a more sustainable cost for a business in California, but it's still high.

It should be noted that top-tier tech colleges (E.g. CMU) are $30k/semester nowadays.

I don't think paying half price is worth the lack of name/credibility, at the least.

I think you mean "prestigious, private" tech colleges ... there are plenty of public universities that rank well in CS and other tech disciplines. Many are under $30K/year with room and board.

$30k seems unreasonable. You can go to Canada, receive CS education from University of Waterloo for 22k/year international student tuition + 500/month rent * 12 months + 500/month living expense * 12 months = 32k / year. Granted admission will be far more difficult, but why would you pay $30k to an institution that is charging as much as a reputable university? I hope they reevaluate the price for the program.

CS creates computer scientists. It doesn't necessarily make good programmers. You can't compare this to CS.

The model in a year-long bootcamp (which is what this is) is vastly more expensive to operate than classic CS education. Being in this business, I think you'd be surprised by the numbers. They're probably barely breaking even at that tuition amount.

>>CS creates computer scientists. It doesn't necessarily make good programmers.

This is making the line between theory and practice too bright, there's actually quite a bit of overlap.

By 19 I was already working as a dev at a game studio you would know well and made a difficult decision to leave and do a CS degree.

It was incredibly worthwhile in my case, and I rely on theory and foundations learned all the time in the real world.

The point is yes you can get a job without a degree but in some cases you will never be quite as strong without investing in that foundation.

You make it sound like what matters most is not actually studying CS but getting a CS degree. Is there something special about getting a degree that would cause a programmer to "never be quite as strong" if they studied CS but not for a degree, for example outside of the traditional college system? Most of the science seems to be freely available, if one is willing to put in the effort needed to learn it without the assistance of a professor.

Yes, there is great quality content available free and online. But it is incredibly rare for some to get a CS level education from it, because it's not something you can easily do part time. Even if you just try to learn the materials from core CS classes I've taken, that's a few textbooks, a few large projects, and a LOT of hours of studying and work. College lets you get that done all at once - if I tried to give myself a "CS education" while having a full time job, I am pretty confident I would have failed. It certainly couldn't come in just a few years.

True, but Waterloo in particular is known for having a great coop program and producing people who know their stuff.

That is true now although it is quite hard to get in. I'm at UW for grad school (not cs) and I don't think I could of gotten into UW with my high school marks for CS or engineering.

I'm rather frustrated with this huge push to create a "new" CS degree, which is basically saying "Let's abandon half of CS and focus on just programming." Computer Science is, obviously enough, the science of Computers and computation. Coincidentally, programming happens to be a tool for computer scientists to interact with computers and demonstrate computational theory. While I understand and appreciate the necessity for good programmers/developers, people seem to miss the point of what a Computer Scientist actually is. It includes a whole lot of theory and knowledge of how computers function and operate, from the fundamental logic up to the application layer. Programming is learned as a Computer Scientist not necessarily for the purpose of a career, but rather as a means of implementing and testing theories and ideas. Much the same as Mathematics where theories are abundant, many of which are necessary to become a mathematician. You don't see anyone trying to create a Math degree that skips a lot of theory and just teaches you Applied Mathematics for a career. While the analogy breaks down when you move into industry, the concept is the same. If you are pursuing a Computer Science degree, you must become a Computer Scientist. If you want a more objective approach, see the definition of Computer Science as put forth by wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science . You'll notice that Software Engineering is but a subset of the field of Applied Computer Science, which is itself a subset of Computer Science. Before I continue ranting I'll just summarize: You cannot forgo or severely reduce the extensive amount of theory behind Computer Science and churn out Computer Scientists. It does not match up. If your goal is instead to produce more software engineers / programmers / developers who are not real Computer Scientists, then you should re-name your degree and your program. You might find CIT/CNIT/IT more appropriate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_technology

Yea, the culture basically is Computer Science == Software Engineering. As much as I hate it, most people get degrees nowadays not for research or education, but to land a job. However by using that association I'd say that it helps a bit to pick out the people who make that incorrect association (and are getting a CS degree for work instead of for research) that otherwise wouldn't take it seriously if it just said software engineering. It leaves more room in the universities for people that actually want to learn CS and the people who didn't know the difference between the terms learns what they need to get a job (since I'm sure true computer scientists would understand that the term is butchered). It's a win-win IMO.

I understand what you're saying, but I think that my point is still valid: If you want to offer a degree to become a Software Engineer, it should be a Software Engineering degree program not a Computer Science degree. Someone else mentioned that the direct path to Applied Mathematics takes form of say an Engineering degree. They are two separate degrees/programs yet clearly Engineering is just the fast path to a career in Math in an industry environment. So too should a Software Engineering degree be a fast path to a career in Computer Science in an industry environment.

Most CS students aren't aiming to be computer scientists (which typically requires a PhD), they just want a job. And software engineering jobs demand CS degrees.

I'm glad that people are creating alternatives to the traditional 4-year CS degree. But personally I think the solution isn't going to involve students paying tens of thousands of dollars to learn information that's available for free online.

The problem is that Computer Science has not been able to mature enough to split programming/Software Engineering into another, separate degree. You do not need a PhD to become a Computer Scientist. If you want to do research and development for a company, it helps but is not necessary. Academia does require it, but that still is not a restriction. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitfield_Diffie one of the co-developers of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange. He never achieved a PhD, yet helped break ground in crypto.

> You don't see anyone trying to create a Math degree that skips a lot of theory and just teaches you Applied Mathematics for a career.

Yes we do. It's called Engineering.

Yeah but you'll notice that it is a separate degree and program, targeted for a career in industry applying the math. There are no "alternative" Math degree programs to make better Applied Mathematicians, because they realized that you cannot give someone a Math degree to be an applied mathematician without all the theory behind it. Hence, Engineering, in your example.

We've been using the SpriteBuilder tutorials on makegameswith.us as a resource for teaching a group of high school students how to program games. It's been extremely valuable for helping them get up and running, and saved us a ton of time.

Happy to hear they are leveling up with MakeSchool.

I gotta say, I hope they've improved. I participated in makegameswith.us and found the experienced to be very disorganized. There was no clear indication of which week you were supposed to be in in regards to the course schedule, and the pods, groups, etc. devolved into a wasteland pretty quickly. Of course, there's also the fact that it would be far preferable to use Swift at this point (or develop for Android) but I may be biased because I loath ObjC.

Congrats MakeSchool! The summer program students I met were very bright and loved the program, look forward to following the gap year program.

This is an exciting space right now. I'm gearing up to launch RPG Classroom this Spring. The name is sort of a combination of their old and new names (gaming and mentoring).

I think their price is a little high, but I guess they have an obligation to charge what people are willing to pay. Instead of charging $30,000, my idea is to accept Bitcoin donations if people are happy with their education.

Besides teaching computer science, I think gamification is a natural next step for primary education (K-12) in this era of attention challenged kids and I hope MakeSchool isn't back-peddling on that. For example, instead of making proof of concept games, I want to put out an RPG that teaches Biology 101 (or build a platform that enables someone else to do it).

Where is Zed Shaw's follow up article to 'http://zedshaw.com/2014/10/19/the-coming-code-bootcamp-destr... ?

>The MakeSchool Gap Year is designed to accelerate the careers of the brightest computer science majors.

I'm confused about what this is offering. If it's for existing CS majors, surely by definition if you're among "brightest", you wouldn't forgo the $5-10k/mo internships available [1] or generous starting salaries you can get right out the door, and instead pay $30k.

[1] https://twitter.com/tzhongg/status/536565474041937921/photo/...

Congrats Jeremy and Ashu! Hope the new Gap Year program does extremely well.

FYI: Title tag on https://www.makeschool.com/home/ is MakeGamesWithUs | Home

Looks awesome. Are there any regulatory issues associated with starting a formal school with a physical location?

Well, they aren't an accredited program, so they're pretty much eliding the regulatory aspects. The flip side is, its students are paying private-college prices (and over three times average resident tuition for state schools) for an unaccredited program. So, is the program significantly better than an AS, BS, or MS when factoring in time and price? Not sure about that. (It appears to be an accelerated and relatively superficial tour of CS, plus a lot of hanging out with startup types. Compare with an undergrad at Stanford or Berkeley plus regular Caltrain or BART trips for coffee in SoMa.)

Having said that, MakeSchool isn't trying to be a replacement for a traditional uni education -- hence the "gap year" terminology -- but for the price, I'd hope they're working with ABET to get some kind of seal of approval of their curriculum. Alternatively, they can do what some colleagues of mine did back in the late '90s, with a similar concept (a "web talent incubator" named Populi) -- they worked with accredited institutions like Pratt to build and monitor their curricula, giving them the imprimatur of a prestigious institution without the regulatory handcuffs.

There's no formal government approval of higher education in the U.S., but there's a quasi-official system of accreditation that effectively puts a stamp of approval on some programs. It's still legal to offer unaccredited programs, but they aren't eligible for some kinds of funding, and some kinds of legal recognition might also be tied to that status (varies by field). My guess is that they are not seeking accreditation, since they don't seem to be aiming to provide something similar to a traditional university curriculum. In that case, the space is basically unregulated. Some details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_education_accreditation...

An online-only school can be accredited at least since the '90s, though, in cases where it does seek to provide education equivalent to a traditional physical-classrooms university, and wants equal recognition. I believe the first online-only university in the U.S. to receive accreditation was Western Governors University (founded 1997): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Governors_University. They charge about $5500/yr, fwiw.

They'll likely just get a career school designation from the State of CA like other bootcamps.

If you ever wanted to get a professional engineering license, you'd need a degree from an accredited institution.

Cmd+F on 'journey'. Was not disappointed.

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