Coding has always been an interest of mine, yet the idea of coding myself has been very scary to me. Especially, after seeing my friends from computer engineering program use coding languages such as HTML, JAVA and PHP which made coding seem extremely difficult language to understand. But thanks to www.codeacademy.com that helped me overcome my fear of coding. This user friendly online educating website makes coding seem interesting and easy for the users with no prior knowledge of coding like myself. This site teaches 3 different types of coding languages: HTML, CSS and JS. My personal experience with coding for the first time was quite fascinating as after all coding wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.
After signing up for code academy it directed me towards the lessons. There were total of 9 lessons on how to use HTML & CSS for beginners. Each lesson was very descriptive and responsive.
This image above shows how each lesson looked like on the webpage. As to begin with, on the left-hand side of the image under the heading “Learn” the site provides a description and set of instructions for the users on what to do. For example, to add a title to your program it will provide an instruction such as <title> which allows you to add title. Furthermore, the middle screen which is grey in colour is where you put in your codes. Lastly, on the right-hand side is where your codes for the content you coded for in the middle section are created. Some of the engrossing features about using Code academy were that every time you add a new code and press run you will notice a difference on the codes that you have created, thus letting the user know what each code does. In addition to that, Code academy also has a feature where it automatically codes for you in case you keep getting the code wrong again and again. Moreover, after each lesson there were quizzes that give you an insight on what you have learned and whether you need further practice or not. Finally, after each lesson the site provides encouragement to its users through badges that you get after completing each lesson. Hence, making the user feel satisfied and acquired through it. I personally got so involved that I ended up finishing the whole tutorial in one day. Images below shows the badges I earned over the course of my tutorial.
My adventure with coding was definitely amazing, as during upcoming summer holiday I am definitely looking forward to continuing my lessons through code academy and maybe collaborate with one of my friends from computer engineering to create something cool of coding. This skill set I believe will definitely help me in future as it gives me a better understanding of how the online world works. I would personally recommend it to all my blog readers if they are interested in how to code.
Lastly, since coding is time consuming and hard I am going to end this blog post with this meme
