Another week ends and for the 2nd one running I’ve managed to exceed my target for time spent on Codecademy 🙌🏽
I realised today that part of this success has to be down to the approach from Codecademy, both in terms of their curriculum content and also the format of that content.
Different ways to learn
When studying with the Interaction Design Foundation, one of their lessons points out that they use a variety of content types to keep the learner engaged. We all learn in different ways, so a mixture of written content, videos and of course the interactive coding that is available via Codecademys online editor, there are a bunch of different ways to consume the content – and to put it into practice!
This also works well with the Accelerated Learning approach where one of the goals is to spend less time consuming the theory and more time applying it.
Muscle memory 💪🏽
Writing with different options available for writing functions and conditional statements/loops, I have begun making more use of arrow function expressions instead of the more traditional function declarations. With the conditional statements, I tried to make more use of switch statements and the ternary operator to become more conditioned to using these approaches.
The flexing of these new muscles will obviously need to continue, but this has been the first time that I’ve been able to understand the construction and usage of these approaches.
Others have tried to teach this information to me and not succeeded – Codecademy has finally let me ‘get it’.
Needless to say, I have no reservation in suggesting that others try Codecademy for learning this stuff. The format keeps on working for me, and I’d say that the delivery of it is a bit more polished than the FreeCodeCamp content – which in turn makes it easier to comprehend.
Weekly status update
I’ve still been concentrating on the Backend course, completing the first of 3 hefty modules on JavaScript syntax. I think I may switch over to the Frontend curriculum in the coming week.
The javascript syntax modules are also covered here, but with some more on the fundamentals of HTML & CSS beforehand. I think it will be worth covering that content before I continue on with the second javascript syntax module – for the sake of completeness as much as anything else.
Todays Codecademy progress levels:
- Front-End Engineer – 11%
- Back-End Engineer – 14%