Any serious learner can make good use of this site, and can walk away with a fair introduction of a good many concepts, knowing much more than when they started. The underlying purpose of the site is clear, though–to introduce programming and web development to new learners. We’ve seen this happening all along these past couple of years. One could reason that as CC matures, its interfaces will mature, as well. Their engineers have devised some truly amazing tools, and I suspect they are all HTML5 canvas based. There are others who have focused all their energy on the canvas element and we can see their progress in the advances made with user interfaces today. I want to, but haven’t dreamt up a suitable project yet. For instance, apart from KhanAcademy and the wee bit here, I have still never developed anything for the HTML5 canvas.

We can spend years writing code and never touch on much of what the languages and interfaces are capable of. The ways we can use them are limitless, albeit with constraints. The tools are HTML, CSS and JS, aided by its many libraries and frameworks. This is what we graduate from CC or KA to move on to, going forward. Our work centers around making these interfaces interactive and dynamic, intuitive and responsive. They are looking at a web page or a mobile app. We won’t be writing code to run in the console, for instance. KA uses an HTML5 canvas based interface whereas CC uses a JavaScript console based interface for much of the courseware, These are really only learning scaffolds, not something we will find ourselves in in ‘real’ JavaScript.

Programming in JS focuses on DOM interfaces. As programmers we are interested in creating interfaces that are usable and that meet their intended goals. How we learn JavaScript is immaterial and the difference in interfaces comes down to subjectivity, more than anything. There are very few lessons, but tonnes of user contributed examples, many being quite sophisticated. Their approach to programming, or rather teaching programming is quite limited in a sense, and focuses primarily on graphical representation. KhanAcademy has had much more time to mature than has Codecademy, and as such their engineers have had more time to develop their interfaces.

Khan academy python coding