For a Monday, I've just had too much fun today! 😂

Part of our mission is to walk-the-walk as well as to teach NoCode to kids so we're building as much as we can of the "system" that runs the business... without coding of course!

This means several tools all working together👇🏻

You may have seen a previous thread on our choice of NoCode tools to build out our LMS but here it is for reference:

https://twitter.com/nocodeforkids/status/1476575346698833921

Behind the LMS is our @airtable Base/CRM although it's more of an engine room than a database of contacts. From here, we can keep track of who belongs to which School & Cohort, what Programme they are on, invites, & even trigger the creation of their Certificate of Completion 🙌🏻

Talking of which, we've partnered with VirtualBadge.io to make use of the release of their @zapier integration so that we can auto-generate the kids' Certificates of Completion. They have a neat editor to create your design & the Zap can feed in the dynamic data e.g. Name

Here's an example of how we used a design we liked in @canva + the clever parts of VirtualBadge to create a professional looking certificate any graduate of our Programme would be proud to own.

Suffice is to say that having amazing tools at your fingertips, tools that require no coding knowledge like these, really can give you superpowers. Sure, we could have created our own tool to auto-generate certificates but sometimes it pays to use existing tools & integrate 👍🏻

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/nocodeforkids/KhD90c5

Auto-generating Certificates, the NoCode Way

I just want to take a few minutes to thank two of the NoCode tool makers, @webflow &amp; @WhalesyncData, who have been very generous in supporting the kids in our first cohort to get signed up + using their products for free. We can't let money stop our kids learning NoCode😱🙏

It was half term last week for some of the kids on our NoCode Fundamentals Programme but it's Monday, back to school, and we're raring to go! Let's build and, most importantly, have some fun 

Philip is a NoCoder in the B2B space, an employer of NoCoders, and also a parent so when he says he loves what we're doing here, we feel proud 😊 https://twitter.com/PhilipLakin/status/1489084797947453441

🔥 1 hour to go! 🔥
Our 1st cohort of 30 kids are starting their NoCode journey today after voluntarily enrolling on our "NoCode Kids Programme" aimed at ages 11-18. This group are aged 17-18 and so we didn't hold back with the depth of content. By graduation they'll be NoCoders!

Here are a some #buildinpublic thoughts as we sit and wait for these young people to start👇🏻

1/4
✅ Designing & building this Programme has been a pleasure
✅ Choosing @webflow to build our LMS + as a core tool in our teaching material was definitely the right choice

2/4
✅ Choose your early adopters well — our 1st customer is v. supportive & excited to be a part of this venture & it makes a huge difference 💜
✅ Plan ahead & chip away at it all every day — @JamesClear's Atomic Habits inspired us here as well as @RyanHoliday's stoic virtues

3/4
✅ Have fun with the things you are less good at — it's less stressful that way! For @HainingMax & myself (@TheFlowAgency) this was audio/video content 😂
✅ Remember that a first version will not be 100% where you want it to be — iteration is key
✅ Ask for any/all feedback

4/4
✅ Try lots of new things — you're experimenting with something new so even though it is based on what you know well, use the opp. to try new things too
✅ Accept that there will be teething problems — we're ready, standing-by in fact, to help the kids out with anything!

I'll leave my musings for now to get back to the last minute prep. including grabbing a coffee. Wish us, but more importantly, the kids lots of luck today and thank you for all your support to date everyone 🙏🏻

No, let's go! 🚀

Cohort 1 kicks off

🥳 That's a wrap! We polished up our Programme's content today in readiness for our first ever cohort who'll start working through it in 2 days. So excited to see what these young people make of our take on NoCode!

Here are a few high level stats for those interested 👇

Our NoCode Fundamentals Programme stats include:

⚡ 20 videos
✨ 2hrs 44mins running time
💫 27 Topics over 5 Modules
🌞 7-10 hrs to complete
✏️ 1000's &amp; 1000's of words! 😅
🌟 20+ NoCode Tools mentioned
😍 6 of which are explored in depth
😁 1 set of incredible skills taught!

Content Complete! Stage 2 Unlocked

I love this post by Ms. Fab especially because building in public is a big part of NoCoding too + what we advocate at all stages of your journey. When different worlds collide, like NoCode &amp; Education, and in this way I smile 😃 https://twitter.com/anafabrega11/status/1476942917860270083

We opted to build our own MVP to house our Programme's content and to manage our students' experience as opposed to running with Podia or another LMS.

Here's why👇🏻

1/ Our MVP needs:

*️⃣ Student Signin & Signout
*️⃣ Easy creation of rich text content
*️⃣ Easy management of video content
*️⃣ Allow student submissions
*️⃣ Ability to gather feedback
*️⃣ One-off & recurring payments
*️⃣ Email invite to Programme
*️⃣ Bypass payment for those invited

2/ We found that our list of features above didn't marry up too well with OOTB LMS's as they tend to stick to a tried-and-tested formula which is fair enough. Rather, by building an MVP LMS we knew we could achieve 100% of what we need and worry about the desirable features later

3/ As we were contemplating platforms to build upon, we were kindly offered access to @webflow's new Memberships beta which would sort out 75% of our needs in one go. The result: we had a functioning MVP LMS in under 2 hours. Big thanks to @matthewpmunger

https://media.giphy.com/media/NUwoRZzHc2Bws/giphy.gif

4/ The true power of "Memberships" comes from its full integration with the rest of the platform - Pages, Collections & Ecommerce. This means that you can:

🚫 Gate any page/content
🚦 Create Access Groups
👥 Manage Users
💷 Create Subscriptions

https://webflow.com/blog/no-code-conf-2021-announcements#memberships

5/ Gated content is crucial for an LMS and @webflow really delivers here as it does NOT rely on Javascript to work which has always been a worry for Webflow designers making use of 3rd party membership tools.

6/ @webflow's CMS, especially its ability to combine dynamic data from its Collections into the design canvas, gives us 100% design control over the LMS itself as well as the content. We also opted to use @systemflow_co's v1.3 design framework for speed (this is an MVP after all)

7/ All our Programme's content - the Modules & Topics - is being created in @NotionHQ first then transported over to a @webflow Collection. We may automate this step but for now it's a manual process to check ourselves as much as anything else.

8/ The only content being hosted outside @webflow is our set of videos which are on @Vimeo. The ability to easily add videos to Webflow by simply supplying a Vimeo URL makes this part super easy:

✅ Topic intro & outro videos
✅ Multiple videos embedded within topic content

9/ When we need to collect either a one-time or a recurring payment, the @webflow Memberships feature will use our standard @stripe account. Depending on the ecommerce plan, Webflow will charge 0% to 2% on top of the Stripe transaction fee which is low compared to other LMS's

10/ The bottom line is that our experience of using Memberships (which inc. Users) + Collections + Vimeo + SystemFlow + Stripe has been amazing. It's enabled us to build our LMS MVP really quickly, without compromising on design or features, and at the right price. TY @webflow 💜

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here:
https://typefully.com/u/nocodeforkids/t/luhmqUwg4pCe

Why build your own LMS?

So during this past week @HainingMax and I have been contemplating a few important things and so in the spirit of building-in-public I'd like to share our thought processes with you + welcome your feedback on any of the following points...

#buildinpublic 🧵

We're setting out to do more for kids than just deliver them a NoCode course but equally, we still need to define our 'edges'. We've established that we're combining 3 pillars to make NCK successful:

1. High Quality Content
2. Vibrant & Relevant Community
3. Flexible Product

👉🏻 High Quality Content
Even for a 'fundamentals' type programme, where the content needs to be easily accessible, it also needs to be clever enough to push our students' imagination and to tap into their problem solving centres. If it can be fun too, then that's a big bonus.

👉🏻 Vibrant & Relevant Community
This second pillar is crucial to delivering as much value as possible to our students: we supply the platform for peer-to-peer learning, they help each other to grow. We'll always be there to guide & inject ideas but we want the kids to 'own' this.

👉🏻 Flexible Product
Ready-made learning platforms are amazing & we've mentioned the power of using Podia before, for example. But we've big plans beyond the pilot study so with NoCode we're probably going to walk the walk & build an MVP to support the structure of our Programme.

Content, Community & Product

This last week we've been heads down figuring out how we are going to structure our programme based on the awesome survey results from the kids the week before. This thread covers some of our thoughts...

#buildinpublic Week 3 🧵

1/ We want the programme to be as relevant as possible to as many kids as possible within an age group. For our 16-18 y.o.'s we are going to focus more on how NoCode skills can help with job prospecting as well as being a useful team member compared to our younger age groups

2/ Our 16-18 y.o.'s are very interested in UI/UX design which sparked an idea: let's invite guest experts to explain certain concepts & show the kids "design IRL" to make it real for them. We have a couple of people in mind already but if you're a web designer & interested DM us

3/ Not all kids will be interested in all the facets of NoCode so we thought, "why not create optional modules along the way?" to allow deeper dives into certain areas, topic offshoots if you like, without restricting the main flow of learning for the kids.

4/ We showed an e.g. in the week of a young person's commercial success by embracing a popular NoCode tool (@NotionHQ) & delivering incredible value to his audience. From this, we've decided to talk with other young people who've created successful products to share their stories

5/ Mental health is an important topic to consider when working with young people. We truly believe that making stuff can be beneficial to wellbeing as opposed to 100% content consumption esp. with the younger age group. So we've decided to lightly cover this within the programme

6/ We've also been testing a variety of audio/visual tools to handle our content creation, post-production, hosting & more. There's no one stand-out tool in this space (sadly) but we're determined to use a NoCode approach to make this efficient for us yet still high quality 📹 🎤

7/ Lastly, we've created a database in @NotionHQ to track all the conversations we've started having with a wide range of people interested in what we're doing. We know that we need to be organised from the get-go as things can happen fast so we need to be on top of our data!