I had the privilege of teaching college students how to program websites for electronic commerce, the only thing was that my students do not have IT nor Computer Science backgrounds -- they were multimedia artists (designers).
Imagine the tedious tasks of checking the codes submitted by your students on each and every machine problem that you require them to solve. Often, teachers are not able to provide immediate feedback to students, leaving the learners in the dark if they did good or improvement must be made on their programming skills.
I recently stumbled upon CodeChum, a startup founded by Jemar Jude Maranga and “Justin” Andre Po. CodeChum is an LMS (Learning Management System) focusing on programming education to complement the instructor’s teaching style through self-learning. Ultimately, CodeChum will make the teacher’s workload a lot lighter and make learning how to program more exciting to students with its built-in content (programming courses and problems database).
“CodeChum started because of my passion for programming. When I first learned about it, I just immediately fell in love. But what made me even more drawn to it was when I found out that other people knew how to program as well. From there I strived to promote programming as fun, easy, and as simple as possible, in the hope of making it less intimidating to all who want to learn it, because I believe the world would change if people would know how to program. This is how the idea of CodeChum came to mind,” according to Jemar Jude Maranga, Chief Executive Officer of CodeChum.
The startup validated their idea when the Cebu Institute of Technology – University tested the platform for some of their programming classes. Improvements in the LMS were made based on the feedback from the faculty of CIT-University. As a testament, five (05) out of ten (10) teams that made it to the Philippine Programming Challenge (national level) came from CIT-U -- all students were trained with the use of the LMS.
At present, CodeChum supports C, C++, Java, JavaScript, C#, and Python programming languages. Aside from the CIT-University, Our Lady of Fatima University, Western Leyte College of Ormoc, Malayan Colleges Laguna, Cebu Technological University, Cebu City National Science High School, and the Philippine Science High School also uses the LMS for their programming courses.
You may try CodeChum for free by visiting codechum.com.