
Codecademy Partners With Twitter, Evernote, and Others To Offer New API Lessons - pclark
http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/19/codecademy-partners-with-twitter-evernote-box-and-others-to-offer-a-suite-of-new-api-lessons/
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juanbyrge
Lol building an app on twitter is one of the stupidest mistakes a developer
can make. They are one of the most hostile companies to developers. Anyone
building anything on twitters API should assume their app will be banned if it
gets any kind if usage.

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bgilroy26
I'm pretty sure that it's a win for Codecademy whether Twitter changes their
API or not. The brand name will motivate students to learn, and the point is
to find out how to work with APIs in general.

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lnanek2
I've heard a lot of people say the Codeacademy lesson quality just isn't that
good yet, so teaching people to use an API that will shoot them in the foot
isn't going to help. And honestly, if they want to teach Twitter, they should
just teach asking the user for a username and password and pretending to be a
web browser, because that's the best practice for using it nowadays. Saw
foursquare doing that the other day.

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pshin45
What does everyone think the ultimate goal and vision of Codecademy
will/should be? i.e. do you think Codecademy will ever be able to evolve into
a platform that churns out new batches of legitimately competent hackers? Or
is it destined to forever be a mere gateway i.e. a "A more interactive
W3Schools/Wikipedia for coding" providing a minimum level of programming
literacy for lifelong non-engineers?

In my case, as a non-technical co-founder, Codecademy lessons help me gain a
minimum practical understanding of the Web in a more time-efficient way,
ultimately allowing me to better communicate with my more technical co-
founders. I just wonder if Codecademy will ever be able to become more than
that.

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shawndrost
I teach at a school for js devs, and many of our students get started at
Codecademy. Based on what I've seen, they're already great at getting people
to square one, but they're facing real challenges if their mission is to teach
people to code.

Let's start with the good stuff: it's very, very engaging, and if I tell an
applicant to go through codecademy, it's pretty likely that they'll get it
done. In other words, they're very good at conversion optimization. They give
the user very straightforward, bite-sized goals, and people end up doing a lot
of work.

However, people that pass through this system end up with a very consistent
and warped skillset. It's not because they're still newbs -- I run into lots
of newbs that didn't go through codecademy, and these guys are unusual.

1) They're very familiar with syntax, and can fluently type code for common
tasks, but have difficulty solving problems with these tools. For instance,
it's very common that I find a codecademy graduate that can easily iterate
through an array and initialize/modify variables, but not sum the elements in
an array.

2) They don't model the program's execution in their head. This is a really
profound and strange fact, with lots of weird corollaries. For instance, they
don't have ways of dealing with errors when syntax-based guess-and-check
fails. The notion of code executing line-by-line is surprising to them. This
is a pernicious problem that requires unlearning.

It's very easy to trace these unusual skill profiles back to the mechanism
that drives codecademy's success in the first place. I don't know what I would
do in their place, but I have a few ideas of things that I'd like to see in
the space:

\--A curated project-based curriculum that takes followers along a similarly-
well thought-out path.

\--A wconsole-based codecademy that makes heavy use of the debugger.

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jonathanjaeger
Very well-put. I'm very busy and only have a certain amount of time to
dedicate to Codecademy, but I'm really enjoying it. However, I agree with
everything you're saying because I often find myself getting through exercises
while not always grasping every aspect. Some of it takes self-monitoring to
know when to go back and go through the concepts or look for outside help,
rather than just seeing the green checkmark by an exercise and moving along.

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neya
Partnering with Twitter? Good luck running a sustainable, reliable business!
The idea by itself is brilliant, but the reality is so harsh, when it comes to
consuming Twitter's API, especially given the fact that the company's
decisions regarding their API usage is highly unstable.

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AznHisoka
Unfortunately, the ones that needs to learn API lessons the most is Twitter,
themselves... not us.

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ux-app
Congrats to the codecademy team for continuing to hit home runs with their
service.

As a high school teacher, I find it to be an amazing resource for teaching
students from age 13 to 17.

So far I've put a few hundred students through the HTML and JS sections and
they all love the self directed nature of codecademy.

The badge system also works surprisingly well. It's really great to hear kids
one-up each other with their badge count and daily streaks.

Codecademy is one of those amazing tech companies that I'd love to work for.
They have great technology, they're changing the world and their execution is
fantastic.

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niggler
Does Codecademy do any sort of QA or provide editing services for user-
contributed courses?

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goronbjorn
Before your course gets published it goes through a 'beta' period where
Codecademy users who have volunteered to be beta testers go through the
courses.

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knowaveragejoe
They've had API lessons for a while,
IIRC(<http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/apis>), I guess the news here is
they've added some more big names to the list.

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aashaykumar92
This is extremely helpful for aspiring programmers/entrepreneurs!

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dizzystar
I think this is pretty good news, but I've also heard lots of bad things about
Code Academy's lesson quality. Will Twitter, Evernote, et.al. have better QA
systems in place?

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zds
I'm the cofounder of Codecademy - we've done a lot of work on our platform for
a while and our lessons are community generated (but occasionally edited in-
house). The lessons by Twitter, Evernote, etc. have been created by those
companies and QA'd both by our community (in beta) and in-house. Let us know
if you see anything amiss!

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paulwithap
Since you're here, I thought I'd throw in my 2 cents on the API lessons:

There seems to be a pretty big knowledge gap from the HTML/CSS/JS tracks to
the API tracks. It's nice that you give some basic info on HTTP requests and
responses, but after that we're sort of left hanging without really knowing
what to do with the material we've been presented. The Youtube lesson, for
example, shows you how to retrieve JSON with the top videos for a given query
and insert it into an HTML file, but what good does that do?

Honestly, most of them seem more like advertising space for the company making
the lesson than anything else.

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mehrzad
Because learning to program obviously means you're making a Twitter or
Evernote enabled app.

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knassy
I found even after becoming competent in HTML/CSS and learning enough JS to do
UI stuff, using APIs was still a mystery to me. Most API documentation is
aimed at a more advanced audience.

I could use cURL to make a request, but I couldn't work out how to fit all the
pieces together in a web app.

API tutorials which are truly for the beginner are a great idea.

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mehrzad
Yeah I agree. But I'm not a big fan of having programming revolve around the
"big guys." My two cynical cents.

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markisonfire
I think it is easier to "test" these types of API calls for beginners with the
biggest names. Understanding how to connect to Twitter is simple, and those
same principles can be used to connect to a wide range of other things. I
think, more than anything, connecting to Twitter or Evernote is "safe". Which
is good for beginners.

