Structured Sandbox

These sites, which are typically geared towards beginners learning a language or tool, provide a guided introduction using a live code sandbox. For example, you’re asked to declare a variable of a certain type, compute a certain value, or perform some task on a data structure (like reverse an array). Typically, these steps are executed using some sort of testing suite to confirm that the user performed the task.

• Strengths

  • Highly interactive. A user usually cannot progress until they’ve successfully completed the coding step.

  • Granularly structured. The courses are usually very well structured, based around tasks or specific exercises.

  • Game-ifable. It’s very simple to award badges and whatnot based on completion.

• Weaknesses

  • Complex to develop. The test suites require a specialized author who can write the tests.

  • Rigid. These tend towards lowest common denominator topics that can only be expressed in simple, step-by-step tasks

  • Tend to be slow and plodding, and it’s difficult (impossible, really) to jump around. A professional wants to be able to extract reliable information quickly, make connections, refer back to other parts of the docs, etc.

Examples include:

Codecademy

Codecademy offers tutorials in JavaScript, Python and Ruby. The tutorials are very tightly structured into small chunks, each with an associated action (like defining a string). The author uses their custom CMS to create both the narrative material as well as the "unit tests" that describe the correct answer. While the classes have generated a lot of buzz and garnered many signups, they have a high incompletion rate.

Code School (Rails for Zombies, Try Objective-C, etc.)

CodeSchool, like codecademy, provides guided tours through various languages. Unlike CodeSchool, each course or class is individually branded. For example, the jQuery class has an Airline/adventure feel, while the Objective-C class has a retro videogame theme.

Try Redis

Try Redis! walks you through the redis database. The interface is purely text based, making it feel a bilt like an old text adventure game, like Zork.