Live data from Hacker News

Follow the journey of three beginners who are learning to code

codelearn.org

1–10 of 38 posts

Re: Follow the journey of three beginners who are learning to code

#2
I'm happy to see them going ahead with this. Codelearn has some interesting technology under the hood and deserves a bit more recognition than it seems to have had so far. (Disclaimer: I've had a preview of their platform as I often write about Ruby/Rails stuff.)

Another thing to bear in mind is that this almost harks back to how the Rails community was in 2004-2006. A ton of people blogging about the things they'd learnt and found out. Then they became experts, Twitter was born, and not so many people blog "hey, I learnt this about Rails!" anymore.. :-)

Re: Follow the journey of three beginners who are learning to code

#6
Neat idea! We'll be following along as we've found students do better with a bit more structure than this program provides, but there are so many ways of learning it may work well.

What I like most is the personal help. It promises not just a video but guidance to the best video based on where the "noob" is located... that's awesome.

I would say that "passively by dropping comments to the blog" feels like a low bar (but maybe I'm reading too literally?). The response rates to questions must be prompt – the difference between getting an answer in 30 seconds and 10 minutes is huge for me, and I've been writing software for 15 years. It's only worse for beginners.

For our students at Thinkful (http://www.thinkful.com/) getting human contact promptly is key... our students only like banging their heads against the wall for so many minutes before getting demotivated!

Re: Follow the journey of three beginners who are learning to code

#7

I'm happy to see them going ahead with this. Codelearn has some interesting technology under the hood and deserves a bit more recognition than it seems to have had so far. (Disclaimer: I've had a preview of their platform as I often write about Ruby/Rails stuff.) Another thing to bear in mind is that this almost harks back to how the Rails community was in 2004-2006. A ton of people blogging about the things they'd l…

Intriguing! What's the tech under the hood?

Re: Follow the journey of three beginners who are learning to code

#8

I'm a touch sceptical here - while I appreciate a noobs perspective whenever I'm starting something new, I prefer to see something that encourages best practice - a mix of experience through the eyes of a noob would be better in my opinion.

Agreed. But note that it's not all "noobs" helping "noobs"... there's someone who knows chiming in with directional support along the way. That's a big difference.

Coursera tries "peer learning"... commonly referred to in the forums as "the blind leading the blind."

At Thinkful we definitely see a benefits from both peers and experts...

Post reply on HN