{"id":14287,"date":"2012-11-24T11:17:30","date_gmt":"2012-11-24T19:17:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2012\/11\/24\/14287.html"},"modified":"2012-11-24T11:17:30","modified_gmt":"2012-11-24T19:17:30","slug":"funny-bit-from-khan-academy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2012\/11\/24\/funny-bit-from-khan-academy\/","title":{"rendered":"Funny bit from Khan Academy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I was curious about Khan Academy's Computer Science<\/a> category; in particular, whether it does a good job of introducing programming to novices.<\/p>\n

I haven't gotten far enough to see what I think of it yet. But the Welcome to Computer Science<\/a> video made me laugh out loud in the first minute, with this bit:<\/p>\n

\n

The language you'll be coding in is called JavaScript, which is what lots of web pages are written in, including Khan Academy. But if your mom who is a programmer ever looks over your shoulder and says, “Hey, that doesn't look like JavaScript!”, you can be like, “Mo-om! That's because I'm using a library called ‘Processing’ on top<\/em> of JavaScript! Duh! Stop looking at me.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The rest of that intro video is also charming and fun and nicely playful. I suspect it goes by a little fast for beginners (I wonder if there's a way to slow down the videos?), but it gives me hope that they might actually provide a good intro to programming in the subsequent videos. And I think it's really cool that they're using Processing; a similar idea to the old “learn to program using Turtle Graphics” approach, but (imo) much more powerful and compelling.<\/p>\n

Another bit I liked, from the next video in the sequence:<\/p>\n

\n

And if you're thinking “What the heck did she just do?” then good<\/em>. That means you're thinking.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

One weird and annoying thing to be aware of if you look at these videos: to get some videos to play, you may need to double-click the little green Play button, instead of standard single-click-to-play.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was curious about Khan Academy’s Computer Science category; in particular, whether it does a good job of introducing programming…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programming"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14287\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}