Discovering Ada Tech School, the school of feminist code

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IT is not just a man's business. This is what the Ada Tech School, a school that wants to encourage women to get into code learning, is trying to prove. Meet the people involved in this project.

In the heart of the Marais, a stone's throw from Place com Bastille in Paris, there is a new kind of computer school: the Ada Tech School. The establishment which has found its quarters in the narrow rue du Petit Musc claims to be a "feminist school accessible to all"whose stated aim is to encourage women to embark on learning the code, a sector still predominantly trusted by men (the rate of feminization is 33% in the digital sector, according to a 2016 survey).

"We launched Ada to respond to a mix and culture issue", explains Chloé Hermary, the school's co-founder. At 25 years old. This former HEC student who readily admits to having evolved"in a macho environment"during his studies, perfectly assumes the"powerful positioning" from school. "It is a social and political act"explains the young woman who had already set up a first school aid company when she left school, because according to her"The educational playground of computing is quite pristine". The words "committed school","feminist community"and"gender bias"come back regularly in the speech of the founding team which is pleased to welcome"70% of female applicants."

"The idea was to create a school in which we feel good, far from the harassment and self-censorship that we can meet elsewhere", argues the founder. Adriel, a"learner"18-year-old echoes this feeling and adds that"caring and communication are key here."The young man ended up there following the advice of a math teacher from self-managed lycée com Paris (LAP), an experimental establishment created in 1982 which promotes alternative teaching. And we must admit that the parentage is almost obvious.

More "radical" than 42 by Xavier Niel

Because in addition to displaying strong political convictions, Ada also wants to rethink the traditional educational model. "The passive learning system is completely sterile"says Chloé Hermary, who does not hide having drawn her inspiration from the Montessori and Freinet methods. Here no notes, controls, or"teacher effect"The two pillars of training are"autonomy and freedom". The idea is to install the"learners" and the "learners"on a personalized learning curve, to individualize the acquisition of skills.

Very quickly we imagine Ada as a competitor to the famous school 42 created by Xavier Niel. "Obviously we have benchmarked 42"admits the young woman at the head of the project, before specifying that Ada"is different in terms of size and operation"and that the school seeks to mark a more change"radical"in the middle. Not difficult when you remember that in 2017Xavier Niel's baby was pinned by an investigation by The New Factory which highlighted a sexist atmosphere and cases of sexual harassment within 42. The case will cost his post to Nicolas Sadirac, the former director general of the school.

"Sometimes we are compared to 42 in the alternative school side"admits Chloé Hermary"but I mainly wanted to create an education model where we break the codes"she continues. Here we teach anyone over 18 (even those without a baccalaureate)"the code as a living language."What matters is more the logic behind an operation than the technical details."We learn programming rather than a language"sums up the director."This allows you not to lock yourself in on a particular language."

To prepare for any eventuality, the course provides "full stack" training, that is to say capable of tackling the construction of interfaces or websites (frontend) like creating databases or maintaining the physical infrastructure (backend). Very quickly the words Javascript, Python, Ruby or CSS are dropped.

"I would like to talk about the end ofInception"

"Of course I didn’t break all these codes on my own"resumes Chloé Hermary. The young woman is indeed surrounded"of supervisors"and"of flanking"who share this particular vision of the school. Yannick François, Educational manager and senior developer at Scopyleft joined the adventure in January 2019 and brought a long experience in the associative environment of learning. Agathe Berault is lead dev at KissKissBankBank and trainer in Ada after going through an engineering school where she readily admits having met "certain gender-related obstacles."It also has a history in the association, within Women on Rails especially.

The educational team and the 11 students of the 1st class move around in a space of not even 100 m². Organized according to codes reminiscent of those of a modern start-up, the only school room is furnished with tables on casters to make the space as versatile as possible. The walls are covered with sticky sometimes scrawled with jargonous language, sometimes covered with a simple and effective message like "the beginning of hunger"stuck on the week schedule on the 12 noon box. On a carton or the students are invited to express themselves, we see a little sentence that we imagine to be a message of distress: "I would like to talk about the end of Inception".

In the bright open-space, there is a kitchen with tea bags lying around, a sofa corner and a few small bistro tables set there. The avowed aim of this arrangement is to "like at health home"A philosophy difficult to take in fault since during our passage, a child of a few years stammered and had fun at the foot of a sofa, almost interrupting by his mumblings the presentation of the school which took place a few meters from him.

An economic barrier

"To settle there, we had to play the watch for months"laughs Chloé Hermary. After a first visit in March 2018, she negotiates with the real estate agency for long weeks, the time to raise the money to be able to sign the lease of what she thought was"a barn with dirt everywhere". On July 31, the signature affixed, the business begins. For a year, the project is built and Ada Tech School welcomes its first promotion in October 2019. The training costs € 8,000 per year, but the second year is alternating , the tuition fees are paid by the company.

When we ask if this economic requirement is not a social barrier for less wealthy students, we are reassured by explaining that many partnerships have been set up with banks and Pôle Emploi to make the bill a little less salty. There is no question of breaking gender stereotypes by excluding precarious populations.

At 9 p.m., leaving the service door, we ask the last, most obvious question: "Why Ada?""In tribute to Ada Lovelace obviously", answers Chloé Hermary, proud to pay tribute to this pioneer of modern computing.

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