Codecademy closes $10M round

I just want to throw out a startup idea that I have, that I hope someone is working on.<p>Codecademy meets Geocities<p>I did my first web programming on Geocities when I was in middle school. I saw an awesome website my friend made with crazy animated gifs and pictures of Shaq. I wanted one for my own.<p>I went home, and in a week, I banged out my own site with pictures of Stephon Marbury and a pageview counter and more animated gifs. It was glorious.<p>I've only been able to learn by doing and the best kind of doing is creating something. I'd love to see someone have lessons in an online, interactive programming environment a la Codecademy, but have the result exist and be live on the web, and provide a basic development environment to just build stuff.<p>In other words, lesson one is "Hello World". When I'm done, my app is available at <a href="http://newapp23.codecademymeetsgeocities.com" rel="nofollow">http://newapp23.codecademymeetsgeocities.com</a>. I'll show my friends. I'll change the text to read "Hello suckas!" I'll move on to the next lesson, or I'll just start playing. I can toggle between viewing my app as a progression of lessons, or as files and folders.<p>If someone's working on this, do let me know.

I'm surprised they are looking to translate the site, considering I think their English version is of mediocre quality. I have been programming for 10+ years and had a chance to go through a lot of the exercises with my girlfriend. It looks like the exercises are crowdsourced from several different authors and therefore lack flow. Additionally, I felt the exercises did not explain enough, or were downright confusing, especially to a novice. For example, one solution required the use of "&#38;&#38;" despite it not being taught in any other previous lesson.<p>I still recommend books for anyone that is serious about learning to code.

----------------------------------------------------------<p>Mr. Simms is unapologetic. “Think about it less as coding and more as algorithms,” he said. “Traditionally there are the 3 Rs—reading, writing and arithmetic. We think algorithms should be the fourth. Not everyone has to learn to code, but needs to learn the notions of algorithms, realizing what you can use code for.”<p>-----------------------------------------------------------<p>This is an odd thing for him say--when I tried Codecademy, the focus was coding and algorithms were given no attention that I could see. Has this changed?

My girlfriend, a CS double-major who wanted to learn JavaScript, tried Codecademy earlier this year. She spent more time trying to guess the exact output the solution required (i.e. the exact string) than actually programming. The app provided no feedback besides "you're wrong". In a few cases, I actually had to debug their minified JavaScript code to determine what output the program expected. Eventually she became really frustrated and quit.<p>I'm not sour on Codecademy, but it seems to me they need better ways of evaluating completion of an exercise.

"The start-up has turned in to something of a zeitgeist and has even signed up the Mayor New York, Michael Bloomberg, who said he would learn code this year. London Mayor Boris Johnson, a man more at ease with Catullus than C++, was reported by the British Broadcasting Corp. to be “in awe” of Mr. Bloomberg."<p>"signed up the Mayor New York, Michael Bloomberg"<p>"London Mayor Boris Johnson, a man more at ease with Catullus than C++, was reported by the British Broadcasting Corp. to be “in awe” of Mr. Bloomberg.""<p>In awe of signing up apparently. Of course I have no personal knowledge of whether Bloomberg has actually done anything on codecademy since signing up. But I suspect he hasn't simply because of his busy schedule and limited utility for learning "to code".<p>It's amazing how things like this get repeated by the press though. As if signing up really means anything at all which it doesn't. It's like signing your name to a petition at the mall.

Congrats to Codecademy. I hope they spend it wisely on fulfilling their promise that "Codecademy is the easiest way to learn how to code."<p>I'm a bit worried about what might happen to all these young potential coders if the marketing doesn't deliver as promised.<p>Meanwhile, I'd like to propose a much humbler effort which is not intended to compete by any means with codecademy:<p>We run a little anti-school from our Brooklyn loft. We call it Kitchen Table Coders [1] because we only allow as many people who can fit around our kitchen table. Every weekend we pick a topic that we're excited about and carve out some time to teach it to others.<p>(btw - we're not a startup nor do we wish to be. If you'd like to start a Kitchen-Table-Coders session in your town, please do. We'll help you get started.)<p>[1] <a href="http://kitchentablecoders.com" rel="nofollow">http://kitchentablecoders.com</a>

I am not a fan of Codeacademy. I don't see how one can learn from typing in a field box. It would be better if they had you build out a functional project kind of like Learn Rails by Example.

I've spent the better part of the last 2 months learning how to code with Codecademy, and though there are some issues that need working out (yes, answer feedback can be erroneous and the crowd sourced tutorials can lack flow) I've found it a phenomenal resource. I didn't want to read a book. I didn't want to be deterred by configuring and downloading new software. I wanted to learn basic syntax and be able to go to my browser, pick up where I left off, and feel like I was building something, and toward these ends (oh... and it's free) I've found it extremely helpful.<p>In short, I am the ideal user of Codecademy and have really enjoyed the experience relative to other resources available.

<a href="http://live.wsj.com/video/83CA8241-F6C4-462A-B236-7F7759005F74.html#!0AA65FE4-E04D-4C37-A8B2-143FFB446D53" rel="nofollow">http://live.wsj.com/video/83CA8241-F6C4-462A-B236-7F7759005F...</a><p>Interesting video to watch. Serious question here. When do you think starting most sentences with "so" is going to stop?

For me, Codecademy was less engaging than Treehouse and Code School. They all offer different approaches to teaching different aspects of development through the browser, and I have thus far spent the least amount of time at Codecademy because I have felt that it doesn't offer as efficient of a learning experience.<p>That being said, it's still a good tool with potential, and they might just be worth whatever valuation this round was brought in at (I didn't see mention of it in the article). Best of luck to the team!

Learning about algorithms is far more difficult and far more important than the mechanics of writing code, which is the focus of sites like Codecademy. I believe that there are certain people whom have minds that can naturally pick up algorithms and break down problems into the different steps needed to solve them. Codecademy will give these individuals most of what they need in order to develop proficiency in writing code.<p>However, these people are not the majority. When I TA'd for an introduction to Computer Science course, most of student's difficulty, especially on more difficult assignments, was not syntactic and getting a program to compile or run but rather conceptualizing and implementing the intermediate tasks that the program needed to accomplish in order to produce the final result. In my opinion, this is the most difficult part of writing anything beyond the most basic piece of software and the area which online programming courses are the least helpful.<p>That being said, I think that Codecademy and similar sites are very helpful of learning the syntax of a particular language which, of course, is the first step to being able to write code.

Richard Branson tweeted this earlier:<p>"Learning by doing: doesn't that sound fantastic? That’s why I’m investing in @Codecademy <a href="http://t.co/V62rcoWK" rel="nofollow">http://t.co/V62rcoWK</a>

I'd be extremely interested to see what their engagement over time looks like. I tried signing up initially but fell off after a few weeks. I realize my behavior isn't necessarily indicative of the behavior of the majority of their userbase, but I feel like it must be a big problem they're dealing with.

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 <i>story</i>, a <i>scenario</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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!

'He said Codecademy wasn’t just about teaching people to be programmers, but about helping people learn higher skills. “There are definitely people who become programmers through the site, but there are also people using these courses to level up what they are doing anyway, like someone going from being an administrative assistant, to someone who can write HTML and CSS for email campaigns.”'<p>Love the concept of 'higher' in this quote. Some become programmers, but some learn 'higher skills' - like writing html. The whole idea of higher (and presumably lower) is fascinating. HTML and CSS is higher than administrative assistant. Does anyone here understand how hard it is to be an admin assistant??? A PA, essentially... Much much harder than hacking a bunch of tweaks on top of bootstrap or whatever.<p>And, incidentally, this whole higher/lower bullshit is what your "founders"/"funders" arses think about you - you are the bitches with the "lower skills" and one day, if you learn, you'll get your own bitches with the "low skills" who will code your marvellously fantastic idea and if it fails it's because they hired muppets, and if it succeeds, it's because they are the next messiah.

There's CodeCademy and then there's CodeAcademy. The latter was registered in 2002 while the former was registered in 2011.<p>Frankly, I'm surprised CodeAcademy hasn't complained about this. When you search for CodeAcademy the results default to CodeCademy.<p>I don't know any of the players, and maybe it doesn't matter, but wouldn't a first-use trademark dispute tend to defer to the 2002 registration?

I did the first 5 weeks of Code Year. But it turned out to take too much of my time with less than optimal results. Honestly, reading "JavaScript: The Good Parts" by Douglas Crockfordm, saves a lot of time and gives you a more enlightening experience relating to understanding JavaScript.

Congrats guys - met Zach a couple of days ago as a friend went working for them... these guys will do big things!

So let's have some analysis, guys. Does this mean the bubble is still going?