Two years ago, we started building a product that would help teach people the skills they needed to succeed in a digital world. As more than 24 million people took Codecademy courses on our web and iOS platforms, we too learned and grew. Now, we’re excited to show you our latest project — a new Codecademy designed from the ground up, aimed to help you learn skills hands-on, with real projects, and constant feedback. Better yet, the new Codecademy experience helps to connect you with the real skills you’ll need to succeed in today’s workplace.
Learning isn’t just about one exercise or “class,” but instead is a gateway to community, opportunities, ideas, and a better life. We’ve witnessed this through the millions of learners on Codecademy and through the thousands of inspiring teachers who have shared their knowledge with the world with our course creator. We listened to them while building what we think is the best learning experience — for anyone, anywhere — to learn the most important skills of today.
In two years, Codecademy has scaled to become larger than we had ever imagined. Our learners, spread across the globe in every country in the world, have:
- written more than a billion lines of code
- joined more than 24 million others in starting the journey of learning to code
- helped to create more than 100,000 courses using our course creator
- hosted meetups in more than 350 cities
- learned on-the-go through our mobile apps for iPhone and iPad, both of which have been featured in the App Store
- worked with nearly 100 partner organizations like The White House and Twitter to both learn and spread their knowledge even further
Today, we’re proud to show off the results of all of that to a few friends and, within days, the rest of the world. The first fruits of this effort are an experience that gets you from knowing nothing to building a website — in this case, Airbnb’s homepage. Along the way, you’ll experiment with blocks of code, see the results of adding and subtracting different parts of a page, and use the real terminology that developers and designers all over the world over use to create websites just like Airbnb’s.
Our new platform leaves you not just with new knowledge, but with a portfolio of projects you can share with your friends, enabling them to learn from you. We’ve even built the capability for you to share your work with future employers, and to demonstrate your new skills. We’ve been testing our new learning interface for weeks and we’ve seen it applied in an amazing number of ways — from designers at major firms winning new consulting work because of their ability to build their designs to students in high school making personal webpages for themselves.
Codecademy’s learning experience comes not just from the data behind 24 million learners and billions of lines of code, but also from the individual stories we’ve heard from our wealth of committed learners. Former book critic Juliet Waters, for instance, started learning with her 11-year old son as part of our Code Year program in 2012. Since then, she’s gone on to chronicle her journey in a book that’s coming soon, noting that programming helped her feel “more connected with others in our tech-driven society.” A parent named Shari told us that her 11 and 13-year old sons had a “reaction to what they are learning [that] beats their enthusiasm for the
.” We work hard everyday to deliver a similar experience for our users all around the world — with more than 65% of users outside the US, it’s important to us that we’re democratizing access to the fundamental blocks of knowledge that can improve peoples’ lives.
Tommy Nicholas’ story is just the sort we’re hoping our new learning environment will foster: he began with almost no programming knowledge at all, and gained enough skills to develop a website, Coffitivity, that was named one of TIME Magazine’s Top 50 websites in 2013.
Billions of lines of code, millions of users, and years after our founding, we’ve been astonished by what people can do when they can easily learn the fundamental skills that can transform their lives. Today, we’ve redesigned Codecademy to reflect that potential — and hopefully to help more people reach their goals and build the future they want to live in.
