This type of environment is a big step in the right direction.

If a student is required to do some work or derives inspiration from this site or others then you’ve got a good complete system.

Ideally you wouldn’t have to require students to engage with learning and it’s not guaranteed that a student will be inspired enough to create their own work (although if they are then great).

If we can add in challenges (e.g. Angry Birds) where students have access to environments and tools that offer this type of instantaneous feedback so that students can solve those challenges through hypothesis that can quickly be validated or invalidated through the feedback loop then I think we will have a learning environment that completes the loop by providing intrinsic motivation to engage with the environment by solving the challenges.

To me that represents one of the greater ideals in education. This is a step toward that and the fluidity of the feedback is very well done.

There’s also nothing to install, and you can upload fun projects. It’s a bit of a hybrid between Scratch and CodeAcademy.

I personally prefer walkthroughs to lectures when I’m learning to code, but I’m open to that being a matter of preference when it comes to short, laser focused videos that have lots of room of real interaction.

Michael P,

I think this is the biggest issue with Khan Academy’s current execution. Most people will sit down to it and not know what to do. They may figure out that they can tweak the code and play with it, but they won’t know how to move beyond that step (if they even figure out that step).

This is why I think you need to introduce challenges that leverage these tools that students need to solve that start out very easy and progressively get more challenging.

I am so pleased to see this interactive demo on “rotation”, because it does exactly why I tell my little artisty kids why they need geometry. I can see giving this as an option for transformations, as it is accessible enough for students who are interested. for I hope they fix the errors in the show and tell, because the picture does not stay on their canvas.

KA seems to be experimenting with more discovery learning recently; a while back, a team member at the Discovery Lab blogged about a PBL lesson here – http://tinyurl.com/9ufgv8s Seemed to match the 3 Act structure very closely.

I agree that this is impressive stuff.

@Matt I hope it will not be like Wolfram’s TED talk. I think he places too much emphasis on automatic calculations without specifying when doing ‘steps by hand’ IS helpful. Following this through he seems to prefer a function “drawHead()” without bothering too explain ellipses, lines. After all, you could argue, why learn them if every programming language has packages and APIs anyway?

While in isolation each of these modules is interesting, the sum total is still a series of skill-building blocks, on the web. Start with variables, or syntax, etc. That’s all Khan Academy ever is.

If anyone wants to really learn programming from scratch, or needs to teach it, I highly recommend the Greenfoot environment, where students are immediately thrown into a game world that they can easily customize. A series of “scenarios”, or mini-games, are used to present programming concepts. The co-creator, Michael Kolling, is still producing short videos that present each concept, and students play with their own scenarios to implement their learning.

That is what teaching is, not the Khan Academy route.

The introductions are good, simple and short. I like that it defines the elements as it moves along. They should connect the introductions of new elements to the documentation more. Software language documentation has a style and form to it that evolved to the way programmers think. Like the way music is written for musicians. You pick up on this early, even as a novice. It is like a catalog of lego blocks.

As an exercise, list all the ways that programming is different than math.

I like KA. When my high school students come into my math class with chem or physics homework and ask questions I can refresh myself on how to do whatever it is they are doing. The students can use it the same way in my math classes, as a reference or reinforcement. I put these programming lessons in the “cute but not really useful” category. They are not good for reference (which one do I look at?), the narrator talks at warp 9, and many of the explanations are in the categories of “huh?”, “what did she say?” and “that makes no sense”. I know how to program so everything makes sense to me. For a newbie this would be a disaster. With a teacher discussing and supervising as the lessons are being done I think these would be cool. But then you have lost the whole point of KA lessons. In Programming I basically teach the same material as the KA programming lessons using Small Basic, Scratch and Corona. A lot more fun, a lot more versatile and a lot more exploratory. Teaching programming is more than teaching code. It has to include IDE management, file management, experiencing multiple environments and a number of other things that do not come to mind at the moment. These KA programming lessons are not a step in the right direction.

KA’s CS offering is awesome for beginners, however its not really CS-level yet. Data structures , classes, polymorphism, recursion .. are yet to come.

Have you seen the CS Practice Zones at Programr instead?

They let you practice hardcore CS programming right in the browser in many languages:

eg: http://www.programr.com/practice/programr211_promo_228/node/567

Kudos for Dan not just correcting but lining out the fact that it was a mere earthling Jessica and not an obvious alien plant (Vi Hart) who did the narration. And for those who haven’t followed the obvious breadcrumb trails to Processing that John Resig has left…look again.

Thanks so much, Kim! I’ll look at that. Also thanks to Garth, who emailed me through my site. My reply bounced.

Hi Shawn, your own programming video lectures are also clear and engaging, and probably a lot of fun for your students. But if they were to be strictly reviewed by someone experienced in the subject for conceptual and factual correctness, problems would arise there as well.

For example, does the following demonstrate a good conceptual understanding of Boolean variables?

If (on) then on = false; else on = true;