This article is nearly 10 months old now, but it still has a valid point about Codecademy:

“I’ve worked my way through all the “Getting Started with Programming” lessons and I’ve even tackled the Intermediate Javascript course. I’ve got badges. I’ve earned achievements. And I don’t know shit. If you were to sit me down in front of a blank IDE and ask me to build something, I wouldn’t have any clue how to begin.”

We’ve yet to try Codecademy with any students, so we can’t speak for its effectiveness, but I haven’t found it very engaging myself. That could be because I’m not the target audience, but I recall having found other intro programming courses fairly interesting from at least a pedagogical standpoint.

I wonder if Codecademy will, in the long run, prove to be more useful as a platform service for teachers: they offer a course creator tool, and their in-browser interpreter (which supports Ruby, Python, and JavaScript) is great for teachers who don’t have to fight with IT to get development environments all set up.

Old but good. _why, back in 2003, on learning programming, where he argues that coding just wasn’t accessible:

The old machines don’t compare to the desktops of today, or to the consoles of today. But, sadly, current versions of Windows have no immediately accessible programming languages. And what’s a kid going to do with Visual Basic? Build a modal dialog?

Makes one wonder what he’d think of Codecademy, Code School (which seems to be overseeing the resurrected Try Ruby) and the like.

Via that excellent Slate article on why the lucky stiff.

Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC argues that Computer Science education sorely needs improvement in the UK, in order to boost the country’s waning video game industry. (That’s where Tomb Raider, Fable and Grand Theft Auto originated.)

An interesting point:

“Somehow the classroom got hijacked by ICT. And that is learning about Powerpoint, Word, Excel - useful but boring after more than a week of learning it. “

There isn’t a direct Singaporean equivalent of the UK ICT curriculum, but we do have the MOE IT Masterplan for ICT in Education, with the BY(i)TES score (3.0!) as a metric. Our requirements look a little broader than the UK’s, and cover educational technology usage in the classroom as well as “ICT leadership” (whatever that means). However, none of this says anything about delivering any “actual” Computer Science education in the classroom, which feels like a pity.

I’m still wondering what the US is doing differently that’s resulted in a resurgence in CS education — has all this been driven entirely by the very public successes of Facebook and other Silicon Valley companies?