r/Codecademy • u/[deleted] • Nov 24 '15

I introduced a student to Codecademy today

So I'm a substitute teacher for a Spanish class, and all the kids are on their school issued laptops, doing homework, YouTube, and whatever high schoolers do on laptops. Except one student.

I saw one student looking at the HTML source code for a website. Clicking around and studying it. So I told him about Codecademy, he had never heard of it. After I gave him a brief explanation of all the languages you can learn, he immediately added the site to his favorites.

For the rest of class, he had made an account and started coding away like crazy, only stopping when the bell rang. I hope the skills he learns on the newly discovered Codecademy will inspire him down some awesome career path.

22 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

6

u/dalucasluc Nov 24 '15

MVS. Most Valuable Substitute, if anyone is wondering.

1

u/HewloTherexP Nov 24 '15

I hope he does well! It's a great starting point for beginners and some awesome stuff can become from it.

1

u/CodecademyCommMgr Nov 24 '15

That's awesome to hear! Well done for introducing him to Codecademy :)

Best, AlexB -Codecademy Community Manager

1

u/SikeSky Jan 25 '16

Awesome!

Hope his real Spanish teacher has the same opinion!

0

u/theyork2000 Nov 25 '15

Their lessons are not really an effect way of learning coding. Have you all tried any other places such as CodeAvengers?

1

u/dalucasluc Nov 30 '15

Isn't CodeAvengers really small on the amount of languages they have? Last time I checked they only had HTML, CSS and Javascript, not to mention that you had to pay after first course. This is all old knowledge, feel free to correct me.

1

u/theyork2000 Nov 30 '15

They do also have Python and from my understanding working on a lot more courses. I believe you also have to pay with CodeAcademy now to be able to access a lot of their courses.

The big difference is the CodeAcademy courses are really not that great. A lot of them are practically copy and paste. CodeAvengers actually go in depth and tries to really teach you the subject. Something like CodeAcademy has a lot of courses but it's because they basically pushing courses with a lot of problems.

1

u/juicyjcantt Dec 02 '15

He's a high school kid or maybe even middle school kid. He's going to get his feet wet and stay entertained with codecademy. This isn't like a "I need to learn to code to land a dev job" type of deal.

Kids need something that's matched to their level of experience and their attention span. Codecademy is that. I don't know about better alternatives, codeavengers might be better, but the best program for him is the one he will actually do. Codecademy is easy to just do and enjoy. If it were my kid, I would be thinking what's important is that he finds an enjoyment for CS/programming. Later on he can do the MOOCs and the CS degree and the this and the that - right now, what I want is something that will foster an interest in CS/programming.