Show HN: Madrassa – Code and Design Courses Reduced to 5sec GIFs

Just launched www.madrassa.co Where I try to tackle the 90% dropout rate that online courses experience, by reducing the 10,15,30+ hours of course material to 1,2,3 minutes total. Using the native language of the web (GIF) to teach Code & Design skills. What courses would you want to see on madrassa?

A few quick comments:<p>1. It would be nice to be able to use arrow keys to move through the courses. Even when I have my mouse, I prefer to use my keyboard for this.<p>2. Related, it would be nice to have the browser&#x27;s back&#x2F;forward work as expected.<p>3. As another commenter noted, it&#x27;s hard to see where in the gif loop it is, some indicator (or ability to restart it) would be great.<p>It looks great and I&#x27;m looking forward to learning using it.

This is a truly interesting concept. By shortening the learning time like this, things seem a lot more doable, particularly on the first levels. I think one of the things that make it so hard for people not to drop out is the fact that just starting seems like this insurmountable task. I wonder how this would work on more complex levels, though. Great job, in any case!<p>I&#x27;d love to see a flappy bird-like game being developed.

Great idea. One small comment: Some of the text needs some work, e.g. for the free lesson on prototype two of the required materials are listed as &quot;A4 paper&quot; (would a letter-sized paper not do, is the specific size important? Better say &quot;a sheet of paper that&#x27;s larger than ...&quot;) and &quot;some pencils&quot; (<i>some</i> sounds strange here because <i>pencil</i> is a count noun).<p>Other than those, when I clicked on the next arrow on the first screen I was presented with a screen with problems (Chrome 38.0 on Mavericks): the text &quot;2&#x2F;20&quot; was sitting on top of the instruction text and the window displayed nothing. Why not detect the user device and put a help message indicating that the site has to be used on a mobile device? When you say &quot;You&#x27;ll only need an iOS or Android device&quot; in the course description I thought (mistakenly) that these will be required <i>in addition to</i> my laptop.

Interesting. I like the implication that content runtime is a <i>cost</i> not a benefit of courses. And the content is accessible as text and forward-skippable nicely. As someone who avoids youtube unless it&#x27;s the only source of information on a subject, this is great.<p>Not entirely sure about calling it &quot;madrassa&quot;, though.

Looks like a nice idea. Here&#x27;s my two cents:<p>1. It&#x27;s a bit hard for me to tell when the GIF starts or loops, specially when I try to read the text below it. Perhaps there could be some small delay at the end, or a progress indicator?<p>2. Could you possibly make the next&#x2F;previous arrows regular links (with return false or whatever is used to prevent it from reloading the page)? I&#x27;m in a setup where using the mouse is awkward, and I can&#x27;t reach that arrow using only the keyboard.

Absolutely. Some of the sites brag about having 30+hour of content, not knowing that for many that&#x27;s scaring them away.<p>Tnx! noting down the flappy bird-like-game course.

Doesn&#x27;t the name have seriously negative connotations... at least in English-language media. Until I looked it up right now, I didn&#x27;t know that is a positive word in Arabic. I have always seen in portrayed negatively and associated with Islamic fundamentalism.

Could not access the site in Chrome. Just got the message &quot;Tnx, we will notify you when new courses become available.&quot;<p>No content available. Seems like it&#x27;s premature to launch an announcement on HN when you&#x27;re still invitation-only.

I can click on &#x27;Get Early Access&#x27;, without entering an email address.<p>I like it! Not so hot on the gifs, but it&#x27;s short and sweet.

Not sure how common this is, but isn&#x27;t your logo really similar to <a href="http://mymixify.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mymixify.com</a>?

Very innovative and fun at the same time. You should showcase this to schools, as kids would definitely love it.