This is an excerpt of an article by Jon L. Denby of NYU explaining a Coding 101 course using our curriculum.
"If you don’t speak ‘computer’ in our current economy, it’s a little like not being able to read the street signs; it’s a major handicap," says Leibovitz.
Thankfully, there is no shortage of students eager to learn.
Leibovitz’s first class, co-taught with programmer David Hu in fall 2012, had only 50 seats available. They were all reserved in less than three minutes of class registration opening, and the wait list grew to 120 students.
While teaching courses at NYU Steinhardt like Video Game Theory, Video Game Industry, and Digital Literacy, Professor Leibovitz realized that many of his students lacked an understanding of how digital systems actually worked. He was looking for a simple way to teach his students computer programming when he stumbled upon the Codecademy website:
I realized it was a really, really good solution for several reasons. First of all, it was something that was modular. You could do it on your own time. You could do several units, or all the units or tracks. It really gave you options.
It was also based on real-world, complete projects—I mean every single track that you have there is based on building a game, building a tip-calculator, building a Blackjack game, building a choose-your-own-adventure game—all kinds of real-world projects. It was written in this language that I thought would resonate tremendously well with our students because it was down to earth, it was English, it was easy to understand.
Continue reading here.