VK Education

For five years now I've been giving lectures and running hands-on design workshops for students of Tekhnopark — an educational program for students of Bauman Moscow State Technical University.

Over that time, around 400 students have gone through my classes. I help developers understand the basics of design, learn Figma, and build interfaces on their own — not just copying ready-made mockups, but understanding the elements and decisions behind them.

The task

Students come to Tekhnopark primarily as developers. Over the course of a semester they work on large projects, which they defend at the end.

At the same time, it's important for a modern developer not only to be able to implement a ready-made interface, but also to understand why it's built the way it is: how visual hierarchy works, what an interface is made of, how its elements relate to one another, and how to keep a product consistent as it scales.

My goal is to give students a basic understanding of design and a practical tool they can use to work on the interfaces of their own projects.

Approach

The course consists of a lecture on design fundamentals and two hands-on Figma workshops.

Instead of learning the tool for its own sake, we build an interface step by step: from simple primitives to components, and then from components to full pages. This approach helps students see design as a system rather than just a set of visual choices.

They apply these skills in their semester projects. I originally taught frontend development groups, and since last year I've also been teaching mobile development students.

Over five years, around 400 students have taken the course, and the feedback has been consistently positive. Many Tekhnopark graduates go on to join our company — so for me this isn't just an educational project, but also a chance to meet future colleagues while they're still studying.