As an academic in 2002 I was given the job of coordinating a course for teaching hundreds of university students how to code. Before I started, the course coverage and pass rate were abysmally low.

It soon became clear that the students were getting stuck on little errors and weren't getting nearly enough help from the two hours per week they had with their teachers.

The following semester, I started writing little snippets of code the students could run to analyse their work and point out any minor errors they'd made. Within a week teachers were impressed by the intelligent questions the students were asking. By the fourth week most of the students had completed the semester's work - and I had to beef-up the course so the students wouldn't be bored with nothing to learn for the rest of the semester!

After several years of research and development of this teaching methodology in the context of academia, I decided to transform it into online learning of real-world coding skills.

Geekuni is an institute which provides online software development courses. Every concept is presented in the context of a hands-on exercise and the completion of the course is a fully functional piece of software.

With immediate feedback, the community of students and a mentor, the Geekuni student can acquire their real-world coding skills quickly.