It's called 42 - the name taken from the answer to the meaning of life, from the science fiction series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

The US college, a branch of an institution in France with the same name, will train about a thousand students a year in coding and software development by getting them to help each other with projects, then mark one another's work.

This might seem like the blind leading the blind - and it's hard to imagine parents at an open day being impressed by a university offering zero contact hours.

But since 42 started in Paris in 2013, applications have been hugely oversubscribed. Recent graduates are now working at companies including IBM, Amazon, and Tesla, as well as starting their own firms.

42 was founded by French technology billionaire Xavier Niel, whose backing means there are no tuition fees and accommodation is free.

Mr Niel and his co-founders come from the world of technology and start-ups, and they are trying to do to education what Facebook did to communication and Airbnb to accommodation.

They aim to do this by combining an extreme form of "peer-to-peer learning" with project-based learning. Both are popular methods among education researchers, but they usually involve the supervision of a teacher.

Students at 42 are given a choice of projects that they might be set in a job as a software engineer - perhaps to design a website or a computer game.

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