Codecademy

I showed Oliver the Codecademy website a couple of months ago, and we spent a little time going through a couple of lessons, but the programming bug didn’t bite. This week, though, Catherine complained to me that she’d been hard-pressed to help Oliver work through “some sort of programming thing,” and it turns out that he gone back to it, of his own volition, and needed some help.

This is why, if you ask Oliver how to calculate the length of a string in JavaScript, he will now happily tell you “dot length.” Like:

"Oliver".length;

We’ve moved on to learn about data types (numbers, strings, boolean — named after George Boole, we learned), comparisons, and if-else statements. So now we’re able to do things like:

temperature = prompt("What's the temperature?");
if (temperature > 30) {
    alert("Man, it's hot!");
}

Codecademy works quite well: the lessons are bite-sized, the explanations hit a nice tone between “hip” and “practical”, and, the evidence from Oliver suggests, it’s a good way to get grounded in programming fundamentals.

We’ll keep working through the lessons for a while and we’ll see where we are in a few weeks and report back; in the meantime, if you or your kin have an interesting in dipping your toe in the gentle waters of coding, Codecademy seems like a good place to start.