Roman Shmelev / Educator story
Overview
I'm founder of School++, free social IT-school for teenagers and adults in Ukraine.
School exists for 11 years and is driven by volunteers. We're using peer-to-peer education format together with adopted Standford CS106A course to give a chance to everyone to learn programming.
School is targeted at hardworking and motivated students, not the talented ones.
Stats and achievements
- Reviews on Google: 4.9/5
- 10+ years of providing free IT education for teens and adults
- 1000+ alumni
- 100+ volunteers and 8 team members
- Latest stats on our self-sustainability
- Friends - I’ve made so many friends, people with whom I share the same values. That is truly priceless
- Some people have told me the school changed their lives. That’s priceless too
Timeline of School++
- 2011 - I started offering free programming lessons to teenagers at local colleges.
- 2012 - Rented building for my school, built the first version of the website, and offered web development courses for adults. As for teens, this year we won a national IT competition with my students! That was fast! 💪
- 2013 - Added an Android development course; the first students started landing jobs
- 2014 - Organized the biggest IT festival vesnasoft.org (video) in our city. Started migrating to a larger space (300m2) and named it "KOWO"
- 2015 - Adopted the Standford CS106A course and made my school completely free for everyone. Opened the space for social initiatives and activists, launched a coworking space and became the main offline hub for the IT community in our city. NGO "KOWO" was born.
- 2016 - Experimented with the Harvard CS50 course but decided to stick with Stanford’s curriculum
- 2017 - Built a peer-to-peer education system hosted the "Mars" rover competition as part of another successful Vesnasoft festival
- 2018 - Launched courses for kids aged 7-11
- 2019 - Expanded P2P education to Ivano-Frankivsk city. Built a free library of IT (and other) books and transitioned teen education from C++ to Javascript 😅 ... Also I've received the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine award
- 2020 - Hello, Coronavirus! 🦠 Our peer-to-peer education became available online for every ukrainian. Moved the school’s site from
.kr.uato.org.ua. We've built our own crowdfunding platform to sustain the school, launched design and QA courses, and organized volunteers to clean and paint a central area of the city near the river 💪 - 2021 - Started a Node.js course, secured free Notion and Gmail accounts as an NGO, and gathered artists from across Ukraine to paint 10 murals in our city
- 2022-2023 - Russia invaded Ukraine 🩸 ... making it harder for students to learn, and harder for us to carry on. Many of our donors shifted their contributions from supporting us to donating to the army instead. Despite this, we survived and made some progress: significantly upgraded the beginner’s course ("zero"), reworked our student support system, optimized other courses to adapt to the unstable situation in our country, and started a Java backend course! Winter 2023 was tough, with frequent power outages and increased utility prices, but we kept teaching. We've also reworked our coworking website.
- 2024 - Started a DevOps course, won a $50,000 grant, and were on the verge of closing the KOWO space but managed to save it. Staying strong!
Some links
- Why is my school free?
- Donate to School++
- 5-second animations coded by our students during the 4th week of studying
- A video and another one from Vesnasoft festivals
- Instagrams: KOWO space and School++
- Marshall B. Rosenberg - Nonviolent Communication: "Words and the way we think matters. Find common ground with anyone, anywhere, at any time, both personally and professionally"
Made it to the end? Drop me a few lines about yourself at contact@rshmelev.com — I'd love to get to know you! 😊