In Codeacademy you do learn by building a functional project: a Blackjack game in Javascript.
It may not be taking a CS 101 course at an Ivy league school, but it's a great game to get people to start using if statements, loops, conditionals, classes, and objects.
Also, there's nothing like putting a bunch of Card objects into a Hand object to quickly realize: "Oh, THIS is why we do object-oriented programming."
Of course, the "final version" of that functional program is in the Javascript console at the moment. But they are adding jQuery classes in addition to their CSS and HTML offerings. The intent is clear: at the end you will have a complete website.
Even now, if you pick up a book on jQuery and know a bit of HTML already, you can bridge the gap between just the Javascript final project and a website in an afternoon. As I did a few days ago: http://www.highwaterlabs.com/apps/blackjack.html
As the cirriculum develops the final will go way beyond just blackjack.
Here's hoping this money enables Codeacademy to ignore funding for awhile and just build!
It may not be taking a CS 101 course at an Ivy league school, but it's a great game to get people to start using if statements, loops, conditionals, classes, and objects.
Also, there's nothing like putting a bunch of Card objects into a Hand object to quickly realize: "Oh, THIS is why we do object-oriented programming."
Of course, the "final version" of that functional program is in the Javascript console at the moment. But they are adding jQuery classes in addition to their CSS and HTML offerings. The intent is clear: at the end you will have a complete website.
Even now, if you pick up a book on jQuery and know a bit of HTML already, you can bridge the gap between just the Javascript final project and a website in an afternoon. As I did a few days ago: http://www.highwaterlabs.com/apps/blackjack.html
As the cirriculum develops the final will go way beyond just blackjack.
Here's hoping this money enables Codeacademy to ignore funding for awhile and just build!