Learn HTML + CSS with a text adventure course
frobocode.comHey HN!
I'm Fabian, the CTO of Frobocode, and I'm pretty frustrated with the state of affairs of coding courses. 10 years ago, MOOCS promised to give us really good educational content that everybody can use to learn programming. They never delivered.
It's 2022 and we still don't have anything resembling A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. What we need is to get out of our lecture-focused educational mindset, which evolved in the middle ages because of the scarcity of books. Why can't education instead be based on gamified, personalized storytelling?
Some great examples are vim.so, Everyday Data Science on Tigyog, Code Wars, and SQL Murder Mystery. Me and my co-founder are also throwing our hats in the ring, and are currently working on the first chapter of a pilot text adventure course. In "The Grand Web Adventure", we want to take students seriously, and show that a gamified course can be both fun and deliver results.
Right now, we only have a signup page publicly accessible, but we’re hoping to finish a small preview lesson for trying out the course soon. We’d love to hear your feedback about the idea, as well as your experiences of learning to code.
I like that format, but the problem in my opinion with such courses is how linear they'll be.
When actually what a person needs when learning a subject is exposure through different methods and ways, and of course, time!
Otherwise they'll be a one trick poney. I know so many people that did different bootcamps and my experience with them is similar, they need a lot of extra training because everything they've learned was in a very linear way. Sometimes it would be better if they would start from scratch and forget what they've learned in the bootcamp.
Every entrepreneur is trying to find the next method that will teach coding to beginners in no time, but nobody is focused on actually building people from beginners to experts.
Some platforms like pluralsight tries that, but they are mostly boring courses.
In the end we have a lot of competitors in the same space, when exactly zero are worth to subscribe long-term(like pluralsight, but it's fucking boring).
Just my 2 cents.
Good point, I think nothing can replace the actual experience of learning coding out in the wild. I personally think that the single most important step for a student learning to code is the transition from the "happy path" of an online course / classroom to a private project where they actually get exposed to all kinds of realistic real-world problems.
This step is actually something that we want to focus on in the later course chapters - e.g. all the things that are required to actually host a website (buying a domain, deploying code, caching, etc)
There are a few gaming based resources:
* https://www.codingame.com/start
* https://codingfantasy.com/games
There are also interactive ones that are project based, for example: https://scrimba.com/learn/htmlandcss
Good luck for your course!
Unsolicited feedback...
As a typophile, the body/H3 text (P/H3 tag) where "letter-spacing" set to "-1px" and "-2px" respectively, makes the website content difficult to read since each letter doesn't have enough room to breath.
(Love the idea of the website btw)
Thanks for pointing that out, the p/h3 letter spacing really was a bit too tight - fixed now
Hey Fabian!
To quote a fellow HN-er:
"No offense but do make a shareware version. Demo if you're younger. No way I'm paying for something like this based only on marketing copy."
I'd add to this: give me why reason anyone would buy something like this based only on marketing copy. Personally I'd consider such a person extremely gullible.
That makes sense - our plan is to make part of the first chapter available as a demo as soon as it's out
Related: https://eraseallkittens.com/
Why do you devalue this course with shitty AI-generated images? They give off a horror vibe and since the details are all wrong, I get the impression that details don't matter in your course. But in coding, it's all about the details (edge cases).
This is actually something we're not super sure about ourselves yet. I think AI art is quite interesting and has a lot of potential for use cases like this course (where we can affordably create hundreds of highly specific illustrations). Of course, the tradeoff is that you end up with illustrations that give off an uncanny vibe, for example the face of the monkey in our hero.
My greatest fear is to make the course too generic when using stock art images. Do you know a (low-budget) way of getting many interesting illustrations?
No offense but do make a shareware version. Demo if you're younger.
No way I'm paying for something like this based only on marketing copy.
"Most coding courses suck" What a terrible opener, friend.
I wish you luck but I know this is not for me. Sorry for the downer. Not really a fan of these alternative teaching methods that add a lot of fluff and layers on what could otherwise be a very simple activity.
I think a simple tutorial that just teaches you how to use a native editor or download a good one and start typing HTML code in it is a much better learning environment.
I'm unsure about this for many people... by far my most involved course @ UCSD was 3d graphics programming w/ OpenGL. The professor had some delightfully zany ideas, including creating a torture chamber w/ extra credit for doing things like like building a gently swinging above head lamp to illuminate weapons on a wall.
I read the associated 500 page book cover to cover twice and various sections up to 4-5 times before completion and had done nearly all the extra credit for all assignments. I finished with a 112% final grade over the 10 weekly assignments. And this was not uncommon, the prof mentioned something like 30% of the students received an A+ and over 80% had an A.
You'd think a course that advertises how to style for mobile would look good on a mobile device. You'd think.
This is a joke. Courses are far better than this.
Is there an ad-blocker for HackerNews?