Hi,

I'm working on a web-based educational environment for programming. I'd like it to be project-oriented, teaching not only the fundamentals of coding but ultimately how to design complete systems from end-to-end, and richly interactive. There are some sites out there attempting to do something similar, and people seems to like them so far. Codecademy is the most famous but there is also Code School and PlayMyCode is one with a game programming twist.

I wanted to ask beginners and veterans alike here what they would be interested in learning. What languages, frameworks, environments, or concepts would you like to see taught in a more richly interactive, community-based way?

Most of the existing sites focus on JavaScript, Ruby, and Python (in that order). My own project is currently being built to teach Ruby with a custom gaming API. In my own experience, a lot of beginners in the 14-26 age group are interested in games. Personally, I think games are a great introduction to many aspects of both coding and computer science. I have some reservations about using Ruby, because I personally dislike the language and don't think it is well-suited to game programming (I come from a C++ background), but there is a lot of interest in Ruby because of Rails. More importantly, to prototype my idea in a web-based environment, Ruby is easier to virtualize and deploy than C++.

Thoughts? How about industry demand for programming skills? What do you think is a relevant introduction to programming these days?

I'm personally interested in Scheme. IMO, one of the few languages where the programmer focuses more on the concepts and not the syntax, keywords, and side effects. With that said, Code Hero seems to be very similar to what you are proposing. Have you checked it out?

Hi, Alpha_ProgDes. I'm familiar with Code Hero but last I looked at it, it was an FPS game that attempted to teach programming. Personally, I think too much game-ification is not the best way to go. What I'm hoping to do is build a platform that teaches people how to develop their own games, whatever they may be, that they can share with friends a la PlayMyCode. It will be built around lessons that first focus on the basic concepts and then how to use them to implement the various parts of a game. I'm designing it so that code samples can be traced, illustrating visually what is happening with each line of code. I think this will be particularly helpful in teaching data structures and algorithms.

TBH, I think JavaScript is more relevant than Ruby. To my knowledge, none of the learn-to-code sites do it properly, though. I'm not aware of any that have the capability to step through code, visualize what is happening to data structures, or even let the user see where there code is getting stuck. I'm hoping Ruby will still be attractive to beginners, though.

I'll have a look at Scheme. Is it deployed widely?

Well I'm not going get into a language war. That's not the purpose of this thread. However, I will point out that he asked for an opinion and I did start my reason with "IMO". So to each his own.

@trzy: Scheme is just a dialect of Lisp and is used more often than not in academic environments. However, seeing that JS, Ruby, and Python are far more well-known and used much more in day-to-day programming, I think you should go with those, unless someone has another suggestion. I hope to see your project grow. It sounds extremely interesting.

Thanks. I will certainly post a link to a demo here once it's up and running. We have a long way to go, though. Maybe in a couple months In the meantime, keep the suggestions coming!

I want to learn some web-based database language. As my spark for networked multiplayer games is growing, I realize I need to know how to access server data and store important information (like profiles) in some sort of appropriate manner.

So there's a "language" and a "topic" rolled in one.