So I'm an actively paying user of CodeSchool and Treehouse and tried out CodeAcademy a few weeks ago after being unfulfilled by it a few months prior.
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!
"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."
I actually find that doing some research on your own encourages an active learning model, which really pays off in the form of better retention/understanding of the material.
It seems that the younger generation's culture of passively consuming large amounts of content has really hampered the ability for meaningful learning.
Well, to be fair – debugging is really, really frustrating when you don't know any programming and therefore have no idea how to even describe your problem in searchable terms, let alone solve it using stackoverflow anecdotes (if you know that stackoverflow exists). IMHO debugging techniques is worthy of separate course in itself.
I had a reply written out yesterday about what's generational decay vs. the evolution of learning (complete with everyone's second-favorite Einstein quote) but at the end of the day, how someone wants to learn is going to resonate with them more than how someone else thinks they should learn. We have a public school system that is dealing with the repercussions of teaching students the same way they did 20, 30, 40 years ago. We can't blame the kids when the results are all the same.
I'm not looking for a one-size-fits-all solution. Web development motivates the hell out of me but that passion alone doesn't help me get over pre-existing barriers and how my brain comprehends things. I assume once I have my first ah-ha! moment the pieces will start falling into place, but I'm just looking for a peg on the wall to grasp onto at this point.
I'm surprised this post got as many upvotes as it did because admittedly I feel out of place here in a sea full of people who are naturally inclined, incredibly determined and/or had some great teachers, so I wasn't sure if my problems would translate.
Learning this stuff isn't as essential to my job as it would be just incredibly useful to me personally, otherwise I wouldn't be so flexible in using these services and would probably be hitting the books instead of making multiple monthly payments. I know if I find a site that I can learn from that any of my friends can learn from it too. There are hundreds and thousands of those people out there who want to learn this stuff in a way that is easy to swallow, which will in turn spur the rate at which we see new services and tools. It's a cash cow if someone does it right, and I want to see them succeed and help them in the process.
Additionally, it also doesn't help me feel better about the quality of the research I'm doing when the top result for any web development question is still W3Schools.
If a service does it right, it is work. No one's asking for a free pass, they're just asking that the content is manageable for the audience they're trying to cater to.
A) If your message is "You're learning it the wrong way. You need to actively work to understand and do research on your own." then that is mildly rude and also not really very germane to the discussion. The whole point of the service is to do the best possible job guiding you through learning programming; having to fire up Google to complete its exercises is a failure mode. The parent is offering specific, valuable feedback as to where and how it fails.
B) But you didn't just say that. Instead, you signed it off with a baseless, bullshit line insulting the poster and half of the userbase, and that's all it is, an insult; unless you have some very interesting studies in your back pocket, you have absolutely no idea whether "passively consuming large amounts of content has really hampered [our] ability for meaningful learning." That is pure flamebait. Leave it in your keyboard.
Not to mention the younger generation's culture of.. cheap shot that always gets under my skin (though I'm not that young).
It's so ridiculous how people can appear insightful with some useless and completely untrue complaint about "young people today," "today's materialist society" or whatever.
Young people today do far far more self learning, actively pursuing stuff that interests them than any previous generation, in my opinion. They have much better tools. My younger brother (in his teens) has for several years been in a mode where he gets into little obsessions about learning this or that. Video special effects. Lock picking. Fishing. Whatever. A lot (maybe most) kids his age are like that. The topic can be whatever: diet, exercise, skin care, sex. Not necessarily the stuff that HN gets escited about but it is the stuff that interest them. I wouldn't surprised to learn that the mean skill level for application of make up has skyrocketed among teenage girls in the last ten years. Their starting point acquiring knowledge knowledge (who is the president of X?) is Youtube but that doesn't make it "passively consuming large amounts of content".
Want to test this? Try giving a group of 35-45 year olds and a group of teenagers photoshop lessons at work or school. Then give them a project. See how many of them are reading online tutorials and watching youtube videos to get things done vs how many are just using the prescribed material with the notion that they can't be expected to know anything outside of it.
This whole thread by the way is amazing. It's all about new ways that people are acquiring knowledge & skills. Full of anecdotes and opinions about what approach or tool for learning stuff is good or bad. What the problems are. Underlying it all is a sense that the best possible learning tools are incredible and coming soon.
Lets give credit where credit is due. Lets look at this as what it is: a discussion about how to make the awesome awesomer.
Thanks for calling the OP up on pure curmudgeonry.
so, my startup used to be a Codecademy competitor but we allowed users to build full blown Rails applications in their browser. our customers ran into the same problems you described and we also felt like an online environment was cheating our users because a real developer needs to know how to use the terminal and set up an environment.
we decided that the automated, "interactive" approach just doesn't work -- the feedback systems are just not flexible or responsive enough. So now we do online bootcamps for WebDev, iOS, and Design where we mentor you and a group of peers virtually. You can check it out at http://bloc.io
It's expensive, but people who are serious enough about learning know that it's an investment in themselves and pays itself back 10x.
Thank you for your response, Roshan. Bloc.io sounds like what I'm ultimately going to need to do. I'd been considering just taking a course locally but had reservations about finding something that fit my schedule and was taught by someone I felt knew what they were talking about.
Do you honestly believe that you can teach a person with no programming knowledge Ruby/Rails in 8 weeks? Having strong HTML/CSS skills and basic JS/Ruby/Rails, I don't see this as a realistic goal, and could leave some people disappointed for the amount of money spent. Thoughts?
I'd really love to write up a blog about this, but I'll do my best to summarize my thoughts here:
It's a legitimate question. Empirically, it seems like it is possible since DevBootcamp in SF has been able to do it and 88% of their students were qualified enough to obtain jobs as Rails developers. I think that's a pretty fair metric to go by.
Our bootcamp is not as much of a time commitment as DevBootcamp, but I think more than half of the battle of learning a new domain is minimizing the space of "things you don't know you don't know". I think that's a much more reasonable goal, after which it's a lot easier to direct your own learning because you've gotten through the steepest parts of the learning curve.
For example, if you never had any concept of a database, it'd be really hard to learn more about them. Someone new to web development and programming probably has no concept of databases being separate from code. If they wanted to have "users" in their application, they probably wouldn't even know how to formulate a question to ask Google. Would they ask "how do I store users in an app?" No, because they probably don't have any concept of "storage" in an app. Or maybe they do but they pick the wrong word and ask "how do I save users in an app?". "save" and "store" are almost synonymous in a general context, but Google will give you drastically different results because they have different idiomatic meanings in a web development context. In any case, neither of those queries will get you what you want from Google (which is, to discover what a "database" is).
I guess my point is that the goal for us at Bloc isn't to cram your brain with enough knowledge for you to call yourself a Rails hacker -- it's to get you through the steep part of the learning curve and give you a large enough view of the landscape of web development for you to continue learning afterword.
Well good luck to y'all. I like the idea, and agree with the analogy. I guess it would just be an important point to make clear to the student they won't be a Rails ninja by the end of the course.
I'm currently at livngsocial doing front-end dev and you may have heard of the Hungry Academy program that they have going on right now. The students (some of which had no prior programming experience) are 4 months in now and it's pretty amazing what they can do.
Yes. It is definitely possible. Remember the 5 minutes blog that Rails used to have on their website?
The timeline can be something like these:
- 2 weeks: basic programming knowledge(just Ruby, not Rails)
- 2 weeks: basic website knowledge(html/css/js)
- 2 weeks: basic rails knowledge(modal/view/controller)
- 2 weeks(final): a final project to do whatever you want?
Most importantly, there is a huge difference between learning it yourself and learning it under the guidance of someone else who already knows a lot about teaching others programming.
This comment reminded me to ask something I had been wondering: does anyone know if there have been any conversations (friendly or otherwise) between the guys at the Chicago-based company CodeAcademy and the New York-based Codecademy (of whom this article is about) regarding trademarks and their respective names? Most people in this forum know that the commenter was referring to Codecademy, but it must be frustrating for the CodeAcademy guys to be getting reviews that mistake them for Codecademy. Was just curious if anyone knows the dynamic between the companies.
mnicole, this is some KILLER feedback. I really want to make our hint system better (I'm one of the programmers that work on CodeSchool). A couple of us have been talking about changing the hint system to not deduct points, except for the last "hint" which is really the answer. We also want to make sure that you know when we are about to show you the answer (or something very close to the answer) so as to not spoil it. I'd like to chat more about how we can make CodeSchool better, if you'd like, you can email me at eric [at] envylabs.com.
Try http://RubyMonk.com and let us know what you think. In it's current setup, the content is not intended for non-programmers, but we'd love the feedback.
Personally I just do not agree with your codeschool comment. I took the rails for zombies one and it felt excellent. and I specially learnt a lot from it.
My designer friend took the jQuery Air course and found it PERFECT. It gave him a lot of cues that it would not have understood without it.
I'm not quite sure what exactly your problems were with it, but you seems quite bitchy for nothing
Speaking of 'bitchy for nothing', it's probably gauche to point out, but as I've had to downvote your last few comments for excessive snark and name-calling, I'd encourage you to pause, reflect, and figure out whether or not you really want to be posting the brash comments you have been.
Your comments don't generally seem too ill-informed, but there are standards of conversation that are worth holding to, and your recent remarks are falling short.
For what it's worth, while I was very impressed by the production value behind 'Rails for Zombies', I felt it was lacking as a learning tool. Coding rails snippets without context in the browser really doesn't translate very well to web app development.
Anecdotes vs. anecdotes. As a paying customer and someone that cares deeply about education and user experience, I'm well within my rights to complain about issues I'm not the only one dealing with.
That you are. If you have any other feedback regarding your experience with Code School, we'd love to hear it at support at codeschool.com
We work every day to improve the educational flow of our courses, and while our weighted hint & point system can be a great motivator for some students it can also be frustrating for others, as we've discovered. We have plans to improve it in the future as Eric mentioned above.
I can't stress enough how valuable honest criticism like this is to us, thanks.
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!