Fun coding short courses for beginners (Sydney/Australia)

[Fresh Bread]

Every now and then I see ads for kids' coding camps pop up on my FB feed. 'Building an app in 3 days' looks quite cool and I'm wondering if anyone knows of/ can recommend a fun, short coding course for adults for absolute beginners?

The course might be a day, a weekend or a few weekends. I'm not looking to work in the field, I'm just curious about how software and apps work. I prefer face to face courses to online learning although I could give online a go.

Google brings up a few options but it's hard to know which companies are any good, especially given the recent training scams, so wondering if anyone has direct experience of any?

[405programmer]

If I were in your shoes and wanted to learn more about programming I would look for a local course or boot camp for the introduction. The first course is the most important because it should help make you more comfortable searching for more resources on your own after the course. Once you have the basics of short coding exercises and some confidence from troubleshooting simple computer weirdness like an editor didn't install correctly or version numbers not lining up, you should be open to taking any of the online classes at your own pace.

Personally the build an app in 3 days courses that I've seen in Oklahoma near me are absolute garbage so I would stay away from something like that. Maybe look for an overview of programming type class. Or maybe introduction to the web. If you have the free time to really learn more about software development then definitely take a computer science 101 class at a community college! You can do this stuff at any age and at any physical ability so this could be a lucrative and fun way to make a little spending money whenever you FIRE. Or you could get a fancypants software job that pays even more!

As an aside, the reason I dislike the "app in a day" classes is they don't actually explain the why of anything. Just "click this button", "copy this code", "okay run the project", then "Done!". If you want to just say you've made an app watch some youtube videos and just pause them and type the code out. You won't gain long term knowledge from that stuff but you would get to check something off the bucket list.

[Fresh Bread]

Thanks 405programmer! I will look for an overview of programming style course or something run by the uni or colleges.

[rab-bit]

There are lots of great (and free!) online programming courses on edX and Coursera for all skill levels. Definitely worth a look if you haven't done so already.