Nicholas Negroponte, Founder and Chairman of the OLPC Foundation
This is Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) Foundation. OLPC is a non-profit organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts which provides low-cost, internet-capable laptop computers to children across the world. Its XO laptops have been designed specifically to meet the needs of children and their usage under extreme weather conditions, […]
Continue reading Nicholas Negroponte, Founder and Chairman of the OLPC Foundation Posted in: Week 04: Entrepreneur Bootcamp
teacherben 4:43 am on October 2, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I signed up for codeacademy when it was in beta and managed to get through the first set of beginning tutorials on javascript. I think it’s great that it has become popular and that so many people have used it to learn coding. I set 2011/12 as my year to learn programming, but I personally found codeacademy to be really dry and ended up turned to other resources. There is no shortage of competing products out there there days. The new Khan Academy computer science section certainly takes better advantage of possibilities for interactivity than these guys, but Khan Academy started off a bit boring too. With the right backers and momentum, I imagine that they will be able to tweak the product to match the wants/needs of their target audience, whoever that turns out to be.
Patrick Pichette 6:04 am on October 2, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
The thing I enjoyed about Codecademy was its ability to encourage younger students to learn to code. Many of my high school students loved the badges and reward system and constantly strived to get more badges and compete amongst themselves. The immediate response and guided approach seemed to work well to help students progress through the content at their own pace. I haven’t looked at Khan Academy’s new computer science course so I’ll need to have another look but I did find Codecademy’s approach to be quite promising. If anything, their core concept could be leveraged to produce content for other courses as well (math, languages, etc..).