JoBlog

My boyfriend is a massive geek, and I organise Cambridge Geek Nights, so when I saw the Codeyear idea from Codecademy, it looked ideal. They offer the chance to learn to code over the course of a year, with lessons e-mailed to you each week to complete online.
Now, I have a bit of a reputation for being able to break programs, finding bugs in games and so on, but I did not expect to come up against a problem in lesson 3 of week 1! The lesson deals with the declaration and setting of variables, firstly showing you the syntax for declaring a variable (var myName;) and then setting it (myName="Jo"). It then asks you to

Try creating a new variable called myFullName with your first and last names.

Typing var myFullName; results in the hugely helpful error message, “Oops, try again”. After some head scratching and some input from David, we found it wanted the response var myFullName = "Jo Anslow";. The fact that you could combine the variable creation and setting into a single line did not occur to me – in fact it is covered in the next lesson, but they require you to apply it before they introduce it.

I think that Codecademy are probably losing quite a few people at this early stage who would give up thinking they couldn’t understand even the simplest lessons – if I didn’t have David in the house, I would probably have quit myself. I shall persevere for the moment, but I’m concerned about what else I’ll find as I continue.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 10th, 2012 at 9:23 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.