Group work and independent study is at the core of Hive Helsinki’s program, which is based on the revolutionary proven model of French school École 42. There are no teachers, no classes and no text books. At Hive Helsinki, students teach and evaluate each other. What exactly is peer-to-peer learning and how does it work?
Hive Helsinki aims to help young people develop skills that are necessary in the real world and in the 21st century job market. Work, on the other hand, usually aims at solving a problem, and it’s usually done in organizations consisting of more people than one.
Therefore, studying at Hive Helsinki is all about team work and solving real-world problems with code. There are no teachers, no classes, no textbooks – only coding.
Coding is more than you’d think
Studying at Hive Helsinki is far from the stereotypes regarding coding. Contrary to how programming is often portrayed, Hive is not for guys only. We want to encourage everyone between 18 and 30 years of age to apply. No previous degree or coding experience is required at Hive – you don’t need to be a math genius to study with us. What we want from students is logic, problem-solving and creativity. Moreover, studying at Hive is not about sitting behind your computer alone day in day out. It’s team work.
Learning by doing
At Hive, students learn by solving problems together. There’s even a fancy name for it: peer-to-peer learning. Peer-to-peer learning is a learning method where students learn from each other instead of learning from an appointed teacher. Explaining what you know to your peers is also a way of learning.
We believe that learning by doing fosters an entrepreneurial mindset and helps students acquire the skills to turn their ideas into reality. At Hive, studying code is not about copying and pasting stuff you find online, but about understanding what you are doing with the code.
So, if there are no professors, who gives the grades? At Hive Helsinki, students evaluate each other. This is called peer evaluation. Your peers will assess the quality of your work based on grade scales defined by the educational staff. Likewise, you evaluate other students.
You create your study path
We have no fixed study paths or weekly timetables. We trust our students to organize their own work and to have the best knowledge of what they should learn. Therefore, students of Hive Helsinki create their own individual study paths within the program. Here, it’s good to remember that freedom comes with responsibility.
This means that as a student, you are in charge of your own studies. Because projects are mostly executed in teams, your mates will depend on you and it is important to be reliable. To help you make your plan, we’ve visualized our curriculum in a figure called the Holy Graph to help students choose a path. We’ve also gamified the study program, which helps students stay on track and up to date with their status.