Comment by f3b5 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by f3b5 | Hacker News Reader

Hey HN!

I'm Fabian, the CTO of Frobocode, and I'm pretty frustrated with the state of affairs of coding courses. 10 years ago, MOOCS promised to give us really good educational content that everybody can use to learn programming. They never delivered.

It's 2022 and we still don't have anything resembling A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. What we need is to get out of our lecture-focused educational mindset, which evolved in the middle ages because of the scarcity of books. Why can't education instead be based on gamified, personalized storytelling?

Some great examples are vim.so, Everyday Data Science on Tigyog, Code Wars, and SQL Murder Mystery. Me and my co-founder are also throwing our hats in the ring, and are currently working on the first chapter of a pilot text adventure course. In "The Grand Web Adventure", we want to take students seriously, and show that a gamified course can be both fun and deliver results.

Right now, we only have a signup page publicly accessible, but we’re hoping to finish a small preview lesson for trying out the course soon. We’d love to hear your feedback about the idea, as well as your experiences of learning to code.

I like that format, but the problem in my opinion with such courses is how linear they'll be.

When actually what a person needs when learning a subject is exposure through different methods and ways, and of course, time!

Otherwise they'll be a one trick poney. I know so many people that did different bootcamps and my experience with them is similar, they need a lot of extra training because everything they've learned was in a very linear way. Sometimes it would be better if they would start from scratch and forget what they've learned in the bootcamp.

Every entrepreneur is trying to find the next method that will teach coding to beginners in no time, but nobody is focused on actually building people from beginners to experts.

Some platforms like pluralsight tries that, but they are mostly boring courses.

In the end we have a lot of competitors in the same space, when exactly zero are worth to subscribe long-term(like pluralsight, but it's fucking boring).

Just my 2 cents.

Good point, I think nothing can replace the actual experience of learning coding out in the wild. I personally think that the single most important step for a student learning to code is the transition from the "happy path" of an online course / classroom to a private project where they actually get exposed to all kinds of realistic real-world problems.

This step is actually something that we want to focus on in the later course chapters - e.g. all the things that are required to actually host a website (buying a domain, deploying code, caching, etc)

There are a few gaming based resources:

* https://www.codingame.com/start

* https://checkio.org/

* https://codepip.com/

* https://codingfantasy.com/games

There are also interactive ones that are project based, for example: https://scrimba.com/learn/htmlandcss

Good luck for your course!

Unsolicited feedback...

As a typophile, the body/H3 text (P/H3 tag) where "letter-spacing" set to "-1px" and "-2px" respectively, makes the website content difficult to read since each letter doesn't have enough room to breath.

(Love the idea of the website btw)

Thanks for pointing that out, the p/h3 letter spacing really was a bit too tight - fixed now

Hey Fabian!

To quote a fellow HN-er:

"No offense but do make a shareware version. Demo if you're younger. No way I'm paying for something like this based only on marketing copy."

I'd add to this: give me why reason anyone would buy something like this based only on marketing copy. Personally I'd consider such a person extremely gullible.

That makes sense - our plan is to make part of the first chapter available as a demo as soon as it's out

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