Awesome Lessons: Highlights from the Kibo curriculum
Traditional universities are failing young Africans, and 30-50% of African university graduates are unemployed or underemployed. Kibo set out to reimagine higher education for young Africans, and build a computer science degree that prepares students for the modern workplace.
Into the weeds of the curriculum
Innovating in higher education isn't just about big-picture changes – it's about changing what happens in the classroom. If university graduates are leaving without meeting employer expectations, something is broken about the teaching and learning happening on the ground.
In these interviews with instructors, we dive into the nitty-gritty of individual lessons. Instructors recall their approach to lesson design, how students reacted, and how their small-scale choices fit into the larger-scale course and degree experience.
In the clips below, you'll hear:
David discuss a Programming 2 assignment on Automated Testing
Farai explain a Challenge Studio lesson on Failure in Entrepreneurship
Ope share an example from Engineering Your Career about a live class on Getting Hired
Folarin tell about the PMD assignment on Design Replication
You can find links to the full videos and transcripts at the end.
Themes
Across the interviews, a few themes stand out:
Engagement, engagement, engagement. Active learning works. Telling students about concepts won't reliably help them remember what you want them to know. In every lesson design, we focused on how students would actively engage with the concepts at hand.
Practical learning experiences help students engage. When instructors focus on how concepts connect to the professional world, they hold students' full attention. There are lots of ways to make courses feel professionally relevant: tools and workflows, guest speakers, war stories, or concept tie-ins to how industry works.
Tech is interdisciplinary, so tech education should be too. Preparing students for careers in computer science means giving them exposure to how different roles collaborate, and helping them discover what kind of work they want to do.
Mindset matters... so teach mindsets! Across many courses, Kibo's curriculum focused explicitly on mindset, empathy, and communication skills. In Challenge Studio, it meant preparing students to cope with failure. In Programming, we showed why it’s worth the work to test edge cases. In Product Management and Design, we showed students to see through new eyes, as designers. In EYC, it was building empathy for the other side of the interview, acting as a hiring manager.
Embracing Failure in Challenge Studio: Farai Munjoma
Failure is an essential part of entrepreneurship, but it's hard to overcome students' ingrained aversion to it. Farai approached the topic from different angles to help students not just hear the words, but internalize the lesson: failure is inevitable and necessary.
Case studies of successful entrepreneurs showed that failure is not the end. Personal stories from instructors normalized discussing failure. Building "failure resumes" helped students reflect on their experiences.
By reframing failure as a stepping stone to resilience and growth, the lesson helped prepare students for the realities of entrepreneurship and innovation.
Unit Testing in Programming 2: David Walter
Unit testing is not always something that shows up in undergrad CS curriculum, and it's not the sexiest way to spend time as a professional software engineer. Still – it has tremendous value! The assignment gave students a chance to see and feel the value that unit testing provides, because they had realistic bugs to catch by writing tests.
Assignments like this introduce students to professional practices and start to think like engineers: considering edge cases and thinking beyond the "happy path".
Understanding the Hiring Process in Engineering Your Career: Ope Bukola
The "Getting Hired" workshop flipped the script on job applications, putting students in the hiring manager's seat. Students reviewed applications and evaluated interview responses from the other side of the table. This helped address a common deficit among students: understanding what the hiring process feels like for the employer. Students were surprised by the time pressure in reviewing applications, and the importance of every communication touchpoint in the application process.
Practical, career-focused lessons like this are highly motivating. Students were attentive throughout the two-hour Zoom session, and said they wished it was longer. They wished a 2-hour Zoom was longer! Actively engaging them in the experience helped change students' mindset much more than reading bullet points from slides.
Design Replication in Product Management and Design: Folarin Lawal
The Design Replication assignment offered students a hands-on introduction to UI design using Figma, a professional design tool. By recreating familiar app interfaces, students gained a new appreciation for the intricate details of design they previously took for granted. This exercise bridged the gap between using apps and understanding how they're built, making the design process tangible and exciting.
The lesson's success stemmed from its highly interactive and visual nature. Students were enthusiastic about creating something from scratch, watching their designs spring from an empty canvas. This approach also helped students discover their interest in design. Unlike early programming exercises, which lack visual appeal, this assignment allowed students to quickly produce polished, relatable results, boosting their confidence and engagement with the material.
Wrap-up and Thanks
Careful attention to detail results in big impact on students. Over students' time at Kibo, we witnessed enormous growth in mindset and identity, as well as core technical skill development.
Designing great lessons takes time and iteration. No matter how well a lesson went, Kibo instructors noted tweaks, changes, and improvements for next time. Quality requires both careful up-front design and willingness to revise based on how the lesson goes. All that took a ton of time, attention, and work.
I count myself lucky to have worked with all of our instructors and curriculum designers at Kibo. They were each dedicated to our students and to rigorous, high-quality education. It was great fun to be a part of their design and teaching process, and to witness the impact it had on students. Thank you!
Links
Embracing Failure in Challenge Studio
Unit Testing in Programming 2
Understanding the Hiring Process in Engineering Your Career
Design Replication in Product Management and Design
Kibo’s full CS degree curriculum has hundreds of lessons and assignments like these. If you're curious to see more curriculum examples, or to use the Kibo curriculum, it's available with a permissive open-source license. https://kiboschool.github.io/kibo-toc/
Note: This post is part of a series exploring lessons learned from Kibo School. Click here to read the series overview and access related posts.