I am a teacher/mentor at a coding school, and our students have been asking me where could I find good side/learning projects for them. Since these will be side projects they wont be able to invest more than 15-20 hours/week into them, but they might form teams if it really looks good. We, mentors will be able to help/guide them but just a little, e.g. help with negotiations or do code reviews.
Some ideas that came to my mind:
- Make a company account on a freelancing site (like Upwork) and let them pick up work from there. The profit is theirs of course.
- Find charities that need help with software development (any idea where?) and help them. Its unlikely that they will get money for these, but it would look good on their (currently empty) CV.
- Anything else? Im open to anything.
They are learning to program in Python (using Peewee, Flask) and know a bit of SQL and HTML/JS/CSS. So the work should be with these languages, I doubt they could pick up a new language easily at this stage. These projects should be about getting real-life experience and adding something to their CV that looks nice. But some monetary compensation would be a big plus.
So anyone got any ideas where I should look?
This could provide some good ideas that could be fun to work on for them and to learn new things.
If you want reach out to them they might be able to set you up with a free account or maybe have a pool of ideas that didn't make the cut that would be perfect for your class to work on.
Possible monetary compensation if they build them as a business. Might be better as solo projects instead of teams if they find an idea they are serious about unless they want to partner with a classmate.
Reach out to local businesses who might have an ongoing need for work your students could do. This would give them some compensation and a taste of real world projects.