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Launch HN: Scrimba (YC S20) – Interactive video for learning to code

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Launch HN: Scrimba (YC S20) – Interactive video for learning to code

#42

Post by gchallen »

Very cool idea! We actually built something very similar for the CS course I teach at Illinois. Example: https://cs125.cs.illinois.edu/lessons/asserting/#switch. We've built this on top of Ace, which allows us to deliver lessons that have a mix of text, playgrounds, and these interactive walkthroughs.

Overall I think that this is a great direction. Glad to see others working on it!

Re: Launch HN: Scrimba (YC S20) – Interactive video for learning to code

#44

Post by asiachick »

rizpanjwani wrote: post #27

I'm not sure about beginners, but as a coder wanting to pick up other languages/frameworks quickly, I prefer text based courses with in-browser interactive code editors. This allows me to move at my pace with minimum distraction and fumbling around, and also when I want to refer back to something later, I can find it in text much more quickly than trying to find the right clip and time.

I wonder if this is this a generational thing or a personal preference. I too generally prefer text with in-browser code editors. I can search text. i can jump exactly to the part I want to reference later. etc...

But, AFAIK most people under 30? will chose a video on youtube over a text (webpage) based lesson at something like 10 to 1 or 20 to 1. Note: I'm pulling those numbers out of thin air, it's just my perception.

It's also possible this is a youtube thing. Click on a single video about how to code something and youtube will start recommending more videos on how to code where as search for how to code something and find an article and your next search will not be randomly recommending more code articles

Speaking of which, I think I would find this horrifying but what if google's search home page worked like youtube so that before you entered your search it showed 20 things it thought you might be interested in based on past search clicks. Scary but it might explain the difference.

Re: Launch HN: Scrimba (YC S20) – Interactive video for learning to code

#46

Post by mrborgen »

mrtimo wrote: post #38

This is awesome! Plans to include data science topics? Seems awesome for web (and the python course). Just tried it out for a couple hours, a little feedback on the UI: -After I changed code around, I clicked "play" on the video (mistakenly thinking it would run my code)- of course it resumed the video, and all my code changes/additions were gone. Frustrating for a few times, until I learned my lesson. -After a video…

Thanks for this great feedback! As for the ‘disappearing code’, you could have gotten back to it by clicking the yellow dot on the timeline. We should obviously make this much clearer.

We’ll make sure to cancel the auto-advance as well if a user starts interacting with the code.

As for DS topics: we’ll first add general backend topics, but DS would be natural to venture into after that.

Re: Launch HN: Scrimba (YC S20) – Interactive video for learning to code

#47

Post by mrborgen »

subrat_rout wrote: post #36

Great and awesome resource. Just signed up as a paid member. My only minor gripe is that most of the courses are geared towards frontend development. It would be great if founders can invite authors to develop some courses on backend development, databases and some SRE etc. Any courses on frameworks such as ASP.NET, Ruby on Rails or Django would be great. I can see the complexity arising in creating in-browser tutori…

Yes, we are going to add backend, but it’s more complicated, as we can’t execute the backend code in the browser.

Btw, if anyone thinks that adding backend support to Scrimba sounds like an interesting problem to work on, please let us know (per@scrimba.com) as we’re looking for new developers to join our team :)

Re: Launch HN: Scrimba (YC S20) – Interactive video for learning to code

#48

Post by [deleted] »

mrtimo wrote: post #38

This is awesome! Plans to include data science topics? Seems awesome for web (and the python course). Just tried it out for a couple hours, a little feedback on the UI: -After I changed code around, I clicked "play" on the video (mistakenly thinking it would run my code)- of course it resumed the video, and all my code changes/additions were gone. Frustrating for a few times, until I learned my lesson. -After a video…

[deleted]

Re: Launch HN: Scrimba (YC S20) – Interactive video for learning to code

#49

Post by mrborgen »

panchicore3 wrote: post #41

is this platform available b2b? as school I would like to use the solution using my courses with my own students.

You can already sign up, create casts, add them to a playlist, and share it with your students. That won’t cost you a dime.

However, the current version of Scrimba isn’t really tailored for this B2B use-case, as I can imagine you’d want to be able to follow students’ progress and perhaps even get assgnments from them?

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