In May 2024 I co-presented a talk called Learning lessons from Data Science Camps with Sathish Thipparapu, Rani Guntikadi and Sowkya Bandi. It covered CCDS, the Certification Course for Data Science, which we call Code For Cause. Since 2019 it has helped about 2,000 students from social and tribal welfare institutions start careers in IT. This post is a short version of what we shared.
Start with the environment
The first batch in 2019 trained 75 students for about three months and placed 45 of them. We learned early that the setting matters as much as the syllabus. The camps are residential, so students have time and quiet to learn. Teaching happens in the regional language, so nobody is struggling with two hard things at once. Laptops are available around the clock, so practice is never rationed.
The most important ingredient is the trainers. Every one of them works in IT or has done so, and nearly all of them came through these camps themselves. A student from a village hostel who sees someone from the same kind of school now working as a data analyst stops wondering whether this path is meant for people like them.
Teach the whats before the hows
Most data science courses open with the Iris dataset or a table of restaurant cuisines. Those examples mean nothing to most of our students. We start instead with data they already understand, so they know what the numbers mean before we teach how to work with them.
The curriculum is T-shaped. Students start in Excel, then learn a bit of SQL and then Python. Familiarity with the keyboard comes first, through Excel shortcuts. Each new tool is introduced as a bigger version of one they already know: a VLOOKUP becomes a join, and a join becomes a merge. When students reach pandas, they are not meeting a new idea, only a faster way of doing something they can already do.
Make progress visible every day
Three months is a long time to stay motivated. Every day ends with recognition for the best performers, sometimes as playful rewards like notes from different countries' currencies. It sounds small, but it keeps the room energetic and turns peer learning into friendly competition.
Pay it forward
CCDS is driven by a simple idea from the welfare school community: those of us who made it through owe the next batch a hand up. Trainers volunteer because someone once did the same for them. That culture makes the model cheap to run, hard to copy and remarkably durable.
If you run a skilling programme for first-generation learners and want to compare notes, write to me.