Innovating in education: the Codam experience, with David Giron

London Futurists

In this episode our guest is David Giron, the Director at what is arguably one of the world's most innovative educational initiatives, Codam College in Amsterdam. David was previously the head of studies at Codam's famous parent school 42 in Paris, and he has now spent 10 years putting into practice the somewhat revolutionary ideas of the 42 network. We ask David about what he has learned during these ten years, but we're especially interested in his views on how the world of education stands to be changed even further in the months and years ahead by generative AI.
Selected follow-ups:
https://www.codam.nl/en/team
https://42.fr/en/network-42/
Topics addressed in this episode include:
*) David's background at Epitech and 42 before joining Codam
*) The peer-to-peer framework at the heart of 42
*) Learning without teachers
*) Student assessment without teachers
*) Connection with the "competency-based learning" or "mastery learning" ideas of Sir Ken Robinson
*) Extending the 42 learning method beyond software engineering to other fields
*) Two ways of measuring whether the learning method is successful
*) Is it necessary for a school to fail some students from time to time?
*) The impact of Covid on the offline collaborative approach of Codam
*) ChatGPT is more than a tool; it is a "topic", on which people are inclined to take sides
*) Positive usage models for ChatGPT within education
*) Will ChatGPT make the occupation of software engineering a "job from the past"?
*) Software engineers will shift their skills from code-writing to prompt-writing
*) Why generative AI is likely to have a faster impact on work than the introduction of mechanisation
*) The adoption rate of generative AI by Codam students - and how it might change later this year
*) Code first or comment first?
*) The level of interest in Codam shown by other educational institutions
*) The resistance to change within traditional educational institutions
*) "The revolution is happening outside"
*) From "providing knowledge" to "creating a learning experience"
*) From large language models to full video systems that are individually tailored to help each person learn whatever they need in order to solve problems
*) Learning to code as a proxy for the more fundamental skill of learning to learn
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration