New coding school opens in Chicago

Jill Tessler just graduated with her Masters of Science in Biomedical Visualization, and now she's taking her first course in coding to create job security for her future.

"Obviously media is an extremely important part of Biomedical Visualization, and understanding how things are moving with web applications, mobile devices, other forms of visual media is very important to my career and I'm trying to move with it," Tessler said.

CodeAbode just opened its doors this week in Chicago, and it's a new type of school specializing in health and medical apps.

It can give students a new job skill or the ability to start their own business.

"I think it's really important because always having the cutting edge technological skills is important to companies. So, if you're talking about Abbot, Baxter or Walgreens, they need people who have these cutting edge skills and our computer science programs aren't churning out enough people," Scott Harper of CodeAbode said.

The ideal student is someone who wants a job in tech or someone who wants to run their own app, and there's no technical background necessary.

"We're hoping to give them the ability to take some idea that they have for an application, they'd like to make a web application or a mobile application that they put on their phones and actually implement it over the course for the next couple weeks," coding instructor Michael Hadley said.

The changing educational model has more people looking for a non-traditional way to get into the tech world.

CodeAbode is hoping to fill that need.

"The traditional thing has been to get a computer science degree at college, but that's expensive, it's very male centric and it's time consuming. It takes 4 years. So we're producing an alternate route for that," Harper said.

After Tessler's first day of class, she's already inspired to build her own medical app and become a business owner, which she never thought was possible before.

"It's a fairly new idea, I'm still kind of surprised at myself, that I'm feeling very Entrepreneurial at the moment, but it's good, it's exciting," Tessler said.

This is a 14 week long program that costs $7,000.

CPS also started offering coding and computer science classes this fall to kids K-12.