Hacker News Reader

Comment by diwank | Hacker News Reader

> Boy, [1] is a long document. I scanned through it quickly and noticed some good ideas

I understand. It's a whole bunch of neat design processes. But it's huge! You can take a look here for the separate ideas. http://dschool.stanford.edu/use-our-methods/

> Have you shipped any of the ideas in [2]?

Yup. We're currently building IHeartCode (turned out to be the most popular). A rough prototype lives at http://iheartpy.com

View on HN

Did your users tell you the animations or design wizardry are important to them? I find them really distracting, and couldn't find any useful content on iheartpy. I know it's rough, but you seem to have started with too much skeleton and no meat.

It's only a few weeks since we began working on it. And we've been working on the backend all this while. The design has received a wide spectrum of opinion: some seem to love it, others find it confusing. I think we'll redesign it once we get the backend finished.

We're filling in the meat right now! There's a lot of work to do and we hope to get things in shape so we can call it a beautiful pig and go from there.

Thanks for the feedback though. Would love to bug you some more if you don't mind. :)

There are only two things that you could do that would help me learn Python: create and curate good learning material. When it comes to education, I think the highest value even today is created by making good new content, not more tools.

> create good new learning material and curate good existing material

Great advice there and I totally agree with you. In fact, we are looking into incorporating great Python tutorials in the public domain to supplement our content.

Actually, we took the interactive approach because to people with little background in programming, the biggest deterrence is fear of breaking things on their PC. On iheartpy.com they can easily try out basic commands without that fear.

I like interactive, but it seems to work well only if you can simulate the commandline well enough in the browser (like Codecademy does). If you do anything advanced, it has to be done really well. These are couple of good examples:

http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XUWpze_A_s

@revorad: Thanks for the links. I liked the Ladder of Abstraction.

On a different note, this discussion is slightly off-topic. Can I shoot you an email some time? (If you don't mind.) Also, I'm really sleepy now (yawn!)

Yeah of course, email's in profile.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com