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Codecademy
Learn programming through an interactive experience.
Zach Zims and Ryan Bubinski were frustrated at how difficult of a time they were having trying to learn how to code. They wanted to create a system that was more engaging and easier than learning from text books or web tutorials. So they created Codecademy, an online website that allows visitors to learn how to code by actually coding in real time.
Before players can even create an account, the website’s landing page encourages them to begin their journey by coding straight from the start. Only after completing a few short programming exercises, players get to create an account, save their progress, and see what rewards they’ve earned. Through a series of individual interactive courses, players are given enough knowledge to progress in exercises of varying difficulty, while sometimes only given enough information to solve a challenge, as they must draw upon previous exercises to come up with the solution.
As the website grows, Codecademy will take submissions for new courses and challenges.
Funders:
Various venture capitalists
Press:
TechCrunch
Venture Beat
New York Times
TNW
Contact:
contact@codecademy.com
Screenshot:
Review the Game
I really like this idea. The site is polished, the pacing seems good, and it makes good use of achievements as intermediate rewards for going through the lessons.
It’s still pretty limited, but might already help people new to programming go from square one to square…two, or so. I’d be interested to see feedback from people new to programming on whether it worked for them.
What’s missing, and what could be really awesome (if challenging to implement), is guidance on how to fix things when players get the exercises wrong. For example, in the first exercise, if you don’t include a semicolon, the interactive window says "SyntaxError: Unexpected token ILLEGAL". It could say something clearer and friendlier.
This is feedback from a programmer:
The prompt to sign up happened too early for me, maybe you should let me finish part three (the first 15 exercises, if I am right) first.
Inputting my name, especially my family name, made me feel uncertain: Do you have any way of storing it? And do you? Maybe you can go for data that is not perceived as being so vital to online security.
However, I really like that game idea and the way that I was able to start playing without even noticing, simply by following the "message box". Only afterwards I clicked on you play button!
So, yes, anyone with no programming experience so far: please post here!
Review the Game