Things Our Students Said That We'll Never Forget

Every bootcamp has a curriculum. Ours covered HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Git, GitHub, Canva, AI, and web design. But if you asked me what I remember most from those three weeks, it wouldn't be any of those things.

It would be the things the students said.

Children have a wonderful habit of saying exactly what they're thinking. They don't care whether it sounds profound. Most of the time they're just trying to make sense of the world, and in doing so they accidentally remind the adults in the room why we started teaching in the first place.

One afternoon, after publishing his website, one student looked at me and asked, "So... anyone in the world can see this now?"

I said yes. He paused for a few seconds, looked back at his screen, and smiled.

It wasn't excitement about HTML or GitHub Pages. It was the realisation that something he had built in a classroom in Bonaberi could be opened by someone he'd never meet. That is a powerful feeling.

Another student spent nearly twenty minutes chasing a JavaScript bug before finally fixing it.

"I don't know what I did," he admitted, "but it works now."

Every developer reading this has probably had that exact experience.

One of our youngest students, Yann, who is only seven years old, had absolutely no interest in whether programming was supposed to be difficult. He simply wanted to know if he could make his homework app look nicer. Sometimes adults spend so much time debating whether children are "ready" to learn technology that they forget to ask the children themselves. They've usually already decided.

Artificial intelligence also produced one of the biggest laughs of the bootcamp

We deliberately asked Gemini about an award that hadn't happened yet. It confidently invented the winner, the film, and even the director. The room erupted. One student looked at the screen and said, "So AI can lie?"

It wasn't lying, of course. It was hallucinating. But honestly, that's not a bad first description. That moment taught us that technology can sound convincing and still be wrong.

There were quieter moments too. Students helping each other without being asked. Someone celebrating another student's website as though it were their own. A class gathering around one laptop because somebody had finally fixed a stubborn bug. Those moments rarely appear in lesson plans, but they're often the ones that matter most. People sometimes ask us whether teaching coding is really about programming.

Of course we teach programming. But we're also teaching patience. We're teaching persistence. We're teaching students that confusing problems usually become smaller if you keep working on them. Most importantly, we're teaching them that creating something from nothing is possible. We'll probably forget exactly which CSS property we introduced on the second Tuesday of the bootcamp.

We'll never forget the look on a student's face when they realised their website was live. That's why we keep teaching.