Looks like Christmas is coming a few weeks early for those who made “learn to code” a resolution for the New Year. Code Academy released a Duolingo style app (for free!) called Hour of Code that mimics the short-snippet lesson bites that are essential for successful learning in the digital age. I’ve used Code Academy’s web-based environment before and lost interest very quickly. Not enough going on to fill the big screen? Maybe. I think the small screen is an advantage even for something like coding. Think small and your expectations shrink a little. Not as much can happen in the smaller space. It’s not as demanding. You don’t expect as much. And in this case, that’s a good thing.
Each lesson is super short. Maybe 3 or 4 screen’s worth, displayed one screen at a time with a 2 sentence intro and a task. A micro concept is introduced. There’s a short snippet of code on the screen. You have to make the code do something by choosing from a few menu options. Then press RUN and you’re done. It doesn’t take a lot of time (and you don’t expect it too either). Remember small is a good thing here. Not a lot of time, not a lot of demands.
But it’s these micro lessons that add up to produce mountains of quality learning. The more consistent you are with using the app each day, the better for sure. But even if you have lengthy breaks in between, it seems the learning sticks around. The bit of Italian I’ve been learning from Duolingo has stayed with me even though I haven’t used the app much in a month. I was able to jump back into a lesson the other day and found that I’d retained pretty much everything I’d learned a few months earlier. I can’t think of too many learning modalities that would be so efficient or effective.
The Hour of Code app teaches the basics of coding from their intro course and is designed to be completed in just one hour. So it’s not going to cover an awful lot of terrain. I would be really curious to see how the Code Academy’s app would hold up under the weight of bigger programming tasks. A design challenge that would be worth pursuing. I’m pretty sure I’d slog through most of what they’d put out in this style which is more than I can say for the web-based version of Code Academy (or any other learn-to-code tool that I’ve encountered so far). And I already know how to code.
While small may be beautiful, really really small is just plain hot. And effective to boot.