▲ ▼ Offline programming course for prisoners
I have a friend in prison to whom I am sending educational materials, I figured that learning programming could be very useful and so I searched for materials which could teach prominent programming languages without access to a computer but couldn't find anything noteworthy.
I understand that a programming language doesn't make much sense without access to a computer, but decades earlier when there were limited access to the computers people still learnt programming through books.
There is a very high population of incarcerated people in my country, I think an offline equivalent of MOOC for programming via paper medium would be very useful to the inmates anywhere in the world.
I saw other remote education related problems on this platform and So, I was motivated to post this.
Rick Wolter has detailed how he became a Software Engineer after 18 years of prison in this podcast - https://corecursive.com/prison-programming-with-rick-wolter/ .
It's offers good insights about the need-gaps in this space.
I appreciate what you are trying to do for your friend.
I'll explore further on this context as well, did you check out how the colleges which offer correspondence degree to prisoners do it i.e. if they offer programming courses in first place?
That is an excellent write-up on the subject, thanks for sharing. None of the correspondence degree courses I checked teach Programming or even Computer Science, they are providing Arts, Bachelor of Science and Math degrees.
Maybe there is a reason for not providing programming course? But the article you shared states how it can be done.
Hey, I came across this story of a person incarcerated for 13 years getting a Software Engineering job - https://twitter.com/jessicamckellar/status/1311349439479463937 .
It seems http://thelastmile.org/ provided the programming course while in prison, they could be what you were looking for.