My high school AP CS course I took as a senior (good ol' apstring.h and friends...) scared me off programming for four years due to an underqualified teacher, a lack of feedback, and a total lack of any sort of big picture approach, so I really like attempts like this to make it more accessible (and more personal than just something totally automated).
In contrast to your AP CS experience, most students in my lower division cohort in college who took AP CS in high school were better prepared for the crash course we were about to take into C++ templates and operator overloading, having been pounded with Java a year (or in some cases, even two years) prior.
I, on the other hand, had started a web-based photo sharing company with a friend using Python at this point, yet was still struggling with malloc. Going through lower division really made me appreciate my deficiencies as a self taught coder and gave me deep respect for the need to truly grok first principles and theory.
I truly resonate with your sentiment. I don't know that everyone should learn to code, but educational experiences like the one I've shared above make me think that everyone should have good access to proper computer science education, at as early of an age as possible, in case they want to develop their craft.
Yeah, that sounds similar to a lot of stories we've heard. We've spent a ton of time making sure it's fun and really accessible, so it doesn't scare people off. If you try it out, let us know what your thoughts are.
The thing I like most from browsing the site is that the demo programs look really interesting. One of the most discouraging things about my high school experience was that we spent what felt like a ton of time memorizing C++ syntax/include file boilerplate, and learning the fundamentals of pointers, and then just used it to sort strings and solve riddles entirely from a command line—but the command line didn't interest me at all back then.
Yeah, we definitely want to make it interesting. We've made some really cool libraries that make graphics on the canvas really easy to use and pretty intuitive, so you can make cool graphics, animations, and games very quickly.
For example, to draw a circle, you just need to type:
Like Zach mentioned, Khan's CS is a great tool and they have a great team. Our approach is a bit different. Right from the beginning we start with "Karel the dog," which allows you to focus much more on problem solving than on syntax. The dog only knows four commands: move, turnLeft, putBall, and takeBall, so the world is greatly simplified. In this way we are really giving comments on how you take a big problem and break it down.
We've found that starting right with graphics (even though very fun to tinker with) is too large a barrier for many students, since there are too many new concepts at once.
There are a number of similarities. Khan's working on making a very slick tool with a really nice interface to let people experiment with coding.
The focus of CodeHS is much more on the instruction from teachers, and it has more structure. We have tutors that give debugging help and feedback on all programming exercises and projects, so you learn much more about programming style in addition to functionality.
I think Khan has a cool tool, but it's only a tool, whereas we're giving the entire learning experience, teacher included.
