Course Overview

Welcome to ReDI School! We really appreciate that you are part of our community. In this page, you'll find an overview of the course. By volunteering, you contribute to our main goal: help our students gain the necessary skills to find a job in tech. ReDI School has now helped over 17.000 people advance their tech skills. This is only possible with the support of our volunteers <3

ReDI Students

Our student community brings together people from over 138 countries. Your course won't be different. Your students will come from a wide range of countries. They also come from diverse professional backgrounds - some are currently unemployed or underemployed, while others are students looking to prepare for their careers. With an average age of 32, many of our students hold a university degree and have several years of work experience. What unites all students is their passion for technology and their aim to build a career in the tech industry.

❤️ Thank you for supporting our students as they take another step in their journey! To learn more about ReDI students and our community, visit About ReDI School.

About the Circle

The Full Stack Circle is a 14-week advanced program designed for students with solid HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and basic React skills who want to gain development experience by working on team-based projects. Each cohort consists of 25 students who collaborate in small teams to build a full-stack application, simulating a professional software development environment.

Course Purpose & Philosophy

• Primary goal: Employability through hands-on experience

• Focus on real-world project work rather than traditional lectures

• Emphasis on production-quality code and team experience

• Encourages self-learning and independent problem-solving

Course Structure

• One main project for the entire semester

• The class operates like a development team

• Students are divided into feature teams

• 3-week sprint cycles

• Gradual transition from teacher-led to student-led project organization

Curriculum Goals

1. Soft Skills: Teamwork, Task management, Project communication, Self-learning

2. Technical Skills: React, Frontend/Backend development, Testing, Git, Clean code practices, Debugging, Documentation

Projects

The students choose at the beginning of the semester a platform they like to clone. The previous project was an AirBnb Clone.

Semester Outline

• Weeks 1 - 3: Tools configuration, development environment setup, project management process overview

• Remaining weeks: Split into 3-week sprints. Each sprint contains a focus topic according to the project type that needs to be completed. Milestones will break down the project into smaller deliverables. Expect weekly homework (project work) during this period.

• Demo Day: At the end of the semester, each team will present their projects to the audience of ReDI course community members.

Sprint Outline

Sprint Phase	Duration	Key Activities
Sprint Kickoff	Day 1	Sprint Planning, Refinement, Work Time
Sprint	Weeks 1-3	Standups, Work Time, Optional Lessons
Sprint Conclusion	Week 3 Day 2	Demo, Retrospective, Next Sprint Brainstorming

Activities Description

Work Time

• This is where the students are working on their projects in class and the teachers are available to help.

• We can encourage them to be investigating their tickets so that they can already start finding any unknowns that we can instruct them on, or to inform us what the next lesson should be about.

• Pair with students, answer their questions

• We do code reviews, look at their work, and see how we can be helping them improve as mentors.

• Prepare the upcoming tickets for the next classes.

Standup

The PM of each team walks them through standup:

• Check the status of the tasks on the board: Any updates, anything blocked or anyone need help?

• Keep it brief - standups are about exchanging important information and connecting with people who can solve your problems, not about solving them there or showing off.

Refinement

• The teachers will already have prepared the relevant tickets for the rest of the week.

• In refinement, you take your team through them and ask the questions: “Is the User Story + Acceptance Criteria clear? Is the task too large to accomplish? Is the task blocked / do you need more info before you could start on it?”. Refine the tasks to the point where the team feels comfortable taking them and working on them.

Planning

• Roughly figuring out who will work on what for the rest of the week. Mainly looking for:

• Does every student have meaningful work available to them?

• Will anyone be blocked by others, and can we avoid that?

Demo

Give the students a chance in front of everyone to showcase what they’ve been working on and made, what they’re proud of.

Retro

At the end of every sprint, we’ll have a retrospective where we address two main points:

• Likes: What did we like (about anything - the tasks, the project, the code, the course, other people?)

• Wishes: What do we wish for, how could we make things better (about the tasks, or the project, the code, or the course).

Sprint Brainstorming

• A large gathering of the entire class where everyone is participating in coming up with ideas for what the next sprint projects could be, and finding out who is interested in them (to form which teams).

Lesson

When we see students needing help on a specific topic (or they request a specific one), then the Instructor prepares a short (20m-1h) lesson on the topic. This should be a bit of a lecture with some slides or other visual materials, and ideally some examples and practice code/session for the students. We will record these lessons.

Sessions

The course has two online sessions per week. For on-site events, check out On-site Activities. The session format differs from what you might have seen before.

Day	Session	Description	Roles
Tuesday 19:00 - 21:00	Project Session	We meet for two weekly online sessions to support the students work step-by-step on the project. Agenda: General stand ups, updates in main room, then breakout rooms	Guides
Thursday 19:00 - 21:00	Project Session	Agenda: General stand ups, updates in main room, then breakout rooms	Guides

Guides

The volunteers (guides) take on the head of basically two roles:

1. Product Manager: Runs meetings (standups, planning, refinement), Prepares and prioritizes tasks

2. Mentor: Performs code reviews, Provides one-on-one guidance, Answers student questions

As a guide, you are both a PM and a Mentor within the sessions :)

On-Site Activities

We are organizing on-site activities in our three main locations. Find out more below.

Berlin

We invite you to four on-site community events throughout the semester if you are located in Berlin and the surrounding. The Onboarding will also take place in person in Berlin. You are more than welcome to join!

NRW

We invite you to four on-site community events throughout the semester if you are located in Berlin and surrounding. The Onboarding and Demo Day will also take place in person in Düsseldorf. You are more than welcome to join!

Hamburg

Four in-person sessions are taking place in Hamburg: Onboarding, two regular course sessions, and Demo Day. If you are based in Hamburg, it would be fantastic if you could support the course in one or more of these sessions.

Conclusion

We hope that by reading this, you have a better idea of the course and what it means to volunteer at ReDI. Let's explore the Timeline now 📅.