Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Recommended Resources Codecademy (learning to program in Javascript)

Codecademy http://www.codecademy.com is a free site for learning to program in JavaScript. You do the programming exercises online -- there is nothing to download. My 8yo likes it. Forbes has an article
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2012/03/22/codecademy/ about it.

ETA: An article mentioning Codecademy and other sites is
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/28/t...net-computer-code-gains-a-following.html
Even Non-Techies Aim to Learn the Internet’s Language
by JENNA WORTHAM
New York Times
March 27, 2012

Thanks very much for the post--I'll check that out. We had tried the Alice program with DD at the end of last year, but there were some bugs and she got discouraged (because it wasn't working the way it was supposed to--not what I wanted her to learn!). I had also bought the "Hello, World" book about programming and had worked through the first chapter or two with her but it's hard for me to find time to work ahead of DD to make it interesting for her (i.e., not waiting for me to figure it out in real time, as I am not a computer whiz).

DS likes it. Thank you. HS tried to teach him Python 1 year ago. He gave up after two weeks and has never touched it. Now he wants to learn coding again.

Thank you so much! I teach the younger grades and this would be a wonderful resource to use as an introduction to programming.

I do not consider Java a real programming language.

Its fine to learn the ideas, but C and its Object Oriented supersets is where the meat is at.

A good basic course in C# based on MS .NET using MS Visual Studio is a good place to start.

Java is one of the most used programming languages and is also used in the AP Computer Science exam and many intro college CS courses. Are you saying that JavaScript (not Java) is not a real programming language? I don't know much about it, but it is one of the ten most popular languages.

Once a kid learns to program he will decide for himself what language he likes most. Getting him or her started is more important than choosing the "best" language, IMO.

Java is a marketing tool.

Many fatal compromises were made in its design and in its various implementations. Whether it runs at all is highly dependent on the java engine (jvm) interpreting it. Many java programs will not run when jvm updates occur. I could go on and on.

But nobody was talking about Java until you mentioned it. Javascript is an unrelated language.

+1 ColinsMum
Why are we talking about Java here when codeacademy.com teaches JavaScript, which is a completely different beast?

That said...


I have seen C++ programs break with updates to the compiler. This is not a purely Java issue, Java simply pushed it farther down the release path.

True, it was JS not Java. Sorry.

Which makes it far worse.

JS is even more of a marketing tool. And even less of a language. And even more buggy.