[Yr7-10it] Codecademy

[Garth, Lucas A]

Hi Jamie,

I've used codecademy and it's a wonderful tool for learning.

A few provisos:

-          A reliable internet connection is required. With everyone running their scripts online, I've found sometimes at school it can be a bit laggy, particularly at the start/end of a period.

-          You really need to do the entire course yourself because sometimes you might have written decent, functional code, but it wasn't written the exact way the program intended and therefore won't advance you to the next level.  Some areas (particularly with the basics) are really simple and your students should fly through, but when it gets more complicated they will need individualised assistance.  The benefit of codecademy is that you can get people working on different areas at once - good for differentiating your class - but this means it can be hard to teach the theory in a sequential manner to all of your class.  The lessons that are written there haven't really been audited and some do not provide enough instruction for an IT teacher to solve their problems, let alone a beginning programmer.

-          Good or bad news is that students can look at the forums to get a look at functional code that will pass the exercise.  Good if your students hit a snag and want to see where they went wrong; bad if your students just want to advance by copying someone else's work.



Not sure I'm sold on using codecademy for an entire unit.  I think it's good for people to get their feet wet and for some startup knowledge in a program.  If your students want to have a nice sampler of a range of languages, that's what codecademy does well.  I reckon it's perfectly placed for an after-school coding club where you can oversee a little more closely, and where assessment is less important than learning.



Lucas



>>>

Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 10:24:56 +1100

From: Jamie Le Rossignol <jlerossignol at gmail.com<mailto:jlerossignol at gmail.com>>

Subject: Re: [Yr7-10it] Textbook + Programming for year 9

To: "Year 7 - 10 Information Technology Teachers' Mailing List"

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Thank you, Diana.



The wikibooks looks like it should give me what I need.



Grok learning (https://groklearning.com/) reminds me of Codecademy ( http://www.codecademy.com/). Which I had a short experiment with, but have not had the time to get right into. Has anyone had a play with Codecademy and what did you think?



Cheers,

Jamie
>>>

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