by nabraham on 6/19/12, 4:38 PM with 94 comments
by smalter on 6/19/12, 5:51 PM
Codecademy meets Geocities
I did my first web programming on Geocities when I was in middle school. I saw an awesome website my friend made with crazy animated gifs and pictures of Shaq. I wanted one for my own.
I went home, and in a week, I banged out my own site with pictures of Stephon Marbury and a pageview counter and more animated gifs. It was glorious.
I've only been able to learn by doing and the best kind of doing is creating something. I'd love to see someone have lessons in an online, interactive programming environment a la Codecademy, but have the result exist and be live on the web, and provide a basic development environment to just build stuff.
In other words, lesson one is "Hello World". When I'm done, my app is available at http://newapp23.codecademymeetsgeocities.com. I'll show my friends. I'll change the text to read "Hello suckas!" I'll move on to the next lesson, or I'll just start playing. I can toggle between viewing my app as a progression of lessons, or as files and folders.
If someone's working on this, do let me know.
by kyt on 6/19/12, 5:44 PM
I still recommend books for anyone that is serious about learning to code.
by asdfdsa1234 on 6/19/12, 4:57 PM
Mr. Simms is unapologetic. “Think about it less as coding and more as algorithms,” he said. “Traditionally there are the 3 Rs—reading, writing and arithmetic. We think algorithms should be the fourth. Not everyone has to learn to code, but needs to learn the notions of algorithms, realizing what you can use code for.”
-----------------------------------------------------------
This is an odd thing for him say--when I tried Codecademy, the focus was coding and algorithms were given no attention that I could see. Has this changed?
by bentlegen on 6/19/12, 5:53 PM
I'm not sour on Codecademy, but it seems to me they need better ways of evaluating completion of an exercise.
by larrys on 6/19/12, 4:59 PM
"signed up the Mayor New York, Michael Bloomberg"
"London Mayor Boris Johnson, a man more at ease with Catullus than C++, was reported by the British Broadcasting Corp. to be “in awe” of Mr. Bloomberg.""
In awe of signing up apparently. Of course I have no personal knowledge of whether Bloomberg has actually done anything on codecademy since signing up. But I suspect he hasn't simply because of his busy schedule and limited utility for learning "to code".
It's amazing how things like this get repeated by the press though. As if signing up really means anything at all which it doesn't. It's like signing your name to a petition at the mall.
by apitaru on 6/19/12, 6:51 PM
I'm a bit worried about what might happen to all these young potential coders if the marketing doesn't deliver as promised.
Meanwhile, I'd like to propose a much humbler effort which is not intended to compete by any means with codecademy:
We run a little anti-school from our Brooklyn loft. We call it Kitchen Table Coders [1] because we only allow as many people who can fit around our kitchen table. Every weekend we pick a topic that we're excited about and carve out some time to teach it to others.
(btw - we're not a startup nor do we wish to be. If you'd like to start a Kitchen-Table-Coders session in your town, please do. We'll help you get started.)
by venturebros on 6/19/12, 5:30 PM
by jeffpersonified on 6/19/12, 6:17 PM
In short, I am the ideal user of Codecademy and have really enjoyed the experience relative to other resources available.
by larrys on 6/19/12, 5:03 PM
Interesting video to watch. Serious question here. When do you think starting most sentences with "so" is going to stop?
by ericdykstra on 6/19/12, 5:49 PM
That being said, it's still a good tool with potential, and they might just be worth whatever valuation this round was brought in at (I didn't see mention of it in the article). Best of luck to the team!
by skibrah on 6/19/12, 10:35 PM
However, these people are not the majority. When I TA'd for an introduction to Computer Science course, most of student's difficulty, especially on more difficult assignments, was not syntactic and getting a program to compile or run but rather conceptualizing and implementing the intermediate tasks that the program needed to accomplish in order to produce the final result. In my opinion, this is the most difficult part of writing anything beyond the most basic piece of software and the area which online programming courses are the least helpful.
That being said, I think that Codecademy and similar sites are very helpful of learning the syntax of a particular language which, of course, is the first step to being able to write code.
by hopeless on 6/19/12, 5:11 PM
"Learning by doing: doesn't that sound fantastic? That’s why I’m investing in @Codecademy http://t.co/V62rcoWK
by goronbjorn on 6/19/12, 5:41 PM
by mnicole on 6/19/12, 7:39 PM
I'm a designer by trade and a visual learner by heart and none of these services have helped me further my grasp on JavaScript as a whole.
CodeAcademy's error prompts are too vague to help those of us who don't know what is fundamentally going on. In one click I can find the answer, learn nothing from it and move on to the next challenge. Being able to cheat so easily is a huge turn-off to me and should be an equally big turn-off to employers/teachers who hope to utilize the badge systems these sites tout to gauge the student's abilities.
CodeSchool is apparently for people who already have a background in programming. Both my boyfriend and I attempted to take jQuery Air (a front-page testimonial says that someone without any JS knowledge could do it) and both of us got stuck at the same part. After doing some reading into the issue I found someone else that was having a similar problem in another course. The answer from CodeSchool was that they just assume students have the knowledge going into a course to tie up any loose ends and that it was intended that they'd have to do some research on their own. Yeah, no thanks. Furthermore, the way they handle "hints" is terrible and detrimental to the experience (I shouldn't have to waste 3 hints and get my score lowered in order to get to the one that's actually relevant to my problem). Another issue I had with CodeSchool is that going through the quizzes of things I already knew to get the badges, the way their app handles your input is really delicate. I wasn't able to use any shorthand CSS (for borders, CSS3 properties, etc.) without it telling me I was doing it wrong (note: Treehouse actually impressed me here). An additional gripe I have with CodeSchool is the quizzes (at least in the case of jQuery Air) feel clunky. It should be possible, if not standard, to have the video framed above the quizzes. I found myself going back and forth trying to find where the instructor mentioned a certain item that was relevant to the scenario, whereas with Treehouse, I was writing the code along with them.
Treehouse is, so far, the best. I liked not having to deal with the lessons associated with what I already knew and I felt the questions within those quizzes were well-rounded enough to make me feel like I wasn't cheating my way to a badge. That being said, the guy that teaches the JavaScript courses is all over the place; his variables and functions are often named "varX" and "funcX" which confuse the user, he waits until 3-5 minutes into a lesson to tell the user to comment out the last lesson (whereas sometimes he actually utilizes the previous code or variables). Where the JS fundamentals courses really fail though is in creating a story, a scenario in which we'd really have to use that code. The worst way for me to learn is to build something that has zero meaning. Writing 10 functions that do nothing but spit true and false at me isn't going to help me understand how and where I'd use such a thing. I need relevance and context.
Overall I've been really unhappy with the online/interactive tools available right now and have really only kept my subscriptions active in hopes that that money is going towards bettering not only the lessons themselves, but the in-browser engagements as well.
There are a few smaller ones I've tried out (and I'm currently registered for a few Coursera courses in case that is better suited to me), but if anyone has any suggestions about other sites I can try, please let me know!
by mangler on 6/19/12, 9:10 PM
Love the concept of 'higher' in this quote. Some become programmers, but some learn 'higher skills' - like writing html. The whole idea of higher (and presumably lower) is fascinating. HTML and CSS is higher than administrative assistant. Does anyone here understand how hard it is to be an admin assistant??? A PA, essentially... Much much harder than hacking a bunch of tweaks on top of bootstrap or whatever.
And, incidentally, this whole higher/lower bullshit is what your "founders"/"funders" arses think about you - you are the bitches with the "lower skills" and one day, if you learn, you'll get your own bitches with the "low skills" who will code your marvellously fantastic idea and if it fails it's because they hired muppets, and if it succeeds, it's because they are the next messiah.
by johnohara on 6/19/12, 5:50 PM
Frankly, I'm surprised CodeAcademy hasn't complained about this. When you search for CodeAcademy the results default to CodeCademy.
I don't know any of the players, and maybe it doesn't matter, but wouldn't a first-use trademark dispute tend to defer to the 2002 registration?
by StephenFalken on 6/19/12, 6:05 PM
by andynosebone on 6/19/12, 6:58 PM
by its_so_on on 6/19/12, 5:10 PM