Why I chose JavaScript for our next course
Before we start, I have to tell you that one of our favourite quotes at CodeBrainer is “Assumption is the mother of all f***-ups”. Having said that, you have to know that we try to make all our decisions based on data and analytics.
NOTE: Surely you can understand that we must leave some details out because they are part of our business model and are confidential.
My goal was to find the best topic/programming language that would enable complete beginners to start their path in programming. As I said before, we wanted to find the topic for our next course based on available information, what the job market is searching for, what is popular, what would be interesting for beginners… The second step is to create the best and simplest course for “complete” beginners.
Those of you who are familiar with our platform know that our first courses were made for Android development. That is because we believe that it is a fun and an easy introduction to coding, and knowing that there is a huge lack of Android developers in the world, it was a “no-brainer” to start of our platform with Android development courses. My challenge is to create a new course with a new programming language and topic.
We are learning all the time, that’s why we researched topics from other authors, teachers, platforms, a few job search sites, a couple of developers forums,… and we started to see that the two most popular topics were JavaScript and Python. The clear winner was decided when we stumbled upon a Stack Overflow survey conducted on more than 60k developers every year. It was obvious in the survey that the two of the most growing languages are JavaScript and Python, they are very neck to neck but in the last year JavaScript grew from 62.5% to 69.8%.
Our goal is to teach complete beginners how to code, that is why it is more appropriate to create a course for JavaScript basics where students will create a useful WEB page and more easily see there progress first hand.
The next move was to select a tool where our students will be coding. We believe that starting to learn in an actual IDE (Integrated development environment) is very important for a beginner. It doesn’t matter what course or programming language we are talking about, we develop our courses around tools that are most popular and most likely to be used in workplaces around the world. This way even when learning basic instructions, you will learn a lot about the IDE you will use.
Again we took a look at the Stack Overflow survey but this time we also made a couple of interviews among seasoned and “rising star” developers. We were convinced that Visual Studio Code has grown a lot in the past couple of years, unlike some other tools that have been the same for years. Next to Visual Studio Code, we will be using Node JS, for demonstrating the back-end aspect of WEB development. We think it is important to create a local server for testing our JavaScript project, to learn how pages are served.
My job is to constantly observe and analyse what the leading platforms in the industry are doing. This enables us to be in the loop of what is happening elsewhere and to always find some room for improvement to develop even better courses or, dare I say it, the best courses. WAIT A MINUTE! Did i just say we make the best courses? :) :) Through my eyes, I believe that we do everything to create the best courses possible.
We did the same thing with this JavaScript topic and reviewed the best courses out there to see what they were missing.
Because we know that to make a course more interesting to students a course has to be fun, useful and most of all visually exciting. It was quickly clear to me that to make a course for complete beginners and as listed above, we have to include HTML, CSS and JavaScript in one course. All three topics have to be combined under one course to show students how to use JavaScript, CSS and HTML to make a good and interactive page.
We measure a course’s success by how many people finish it, and we believe that it is essential to have an interesting project/content while learning. For example, if we were making a WEB designer course, we would definitely be developing a course called “Design a web page of your favourite elbow patches on baggy sweaters” because all hipsters want to be WEB designers. :)
Unsurprisingly the biggest age group of people who want to become web developers is between 24 and 35. At this age, you start to take care of yourself and perhaps even start cooking your own meals. :) this is one of the rare assumptions we made and based on it decided that the content for our JavaScript course should be “How to develop a WEB page for cooking recipes”.
There you have it! Based on research we have developed a JavaScript course where our students build a simple but very nice WEB page with cooking recipes. Through building a WEB page students who have never seen a line of code, learn the basics of HTML, basic CSS styling for web pages and how JavaScript helps make the WEB more interactive. The course is developed so that students are introduced to the fundamentals while creating a real and working WEB site. The design of the WEB site is modern, this way they are introduced to the most up to date styling, which better prepares them for real-life projects in the future. They are provided with information, material and skills, that when they finish the course they, can start their own projects.
CodeBrainer Topics (here is the link where you will find the course in coming weeks).A New Way Of Learning How To Code
Originally published at www.codebrainer.com.
