It’s no secret that I am a fan of Codeacademy.com As someone who is still learning to code and at a very basic level their “gamification” of the process of learn to code is great approach that uses proven psychology to motivate even the busiest people to learn.
Although Codeacademy has had courses for HTML, CSS, JQuery, Javascript, Python and Ruby for a while, it has just opened up courses in PHP, the heart of WordPress.
How Does CodeAcademy Work?
Codeacademy works by showing you some example text and the function it does, then it asks you to add the features that the code you just saw does.
However, it hides the code so you have to remember how the code looks forcing your brain to concentrate on the text you saw. If you can’t remember it, you can “peek” at what the general function is to help you remember.
Once you’ve finished an exercise, click submit and it will take you to the next one. When you have done a few of these exercises you get a “badge” and collect points as you go.
Even better, Codeacademy will send you occasional emails to remind you that you haven’t logged in for a while and encourage you to continue learning. All these prompts are a great way to encourage yourself to learn to code.
The PHP Course
Unfortunately there is only a basic PHP course set up at the moment and Codeacademy is encouraging people to help contribute and finish the PHP course.
It’s also a general PHP course and not WordPress specific so you might have to spend some time to adapt the lessons you learn to WordPress, but you will understand the nuts and bolts and processes that occur more than just “if I cut and paste this code from here then it will do X”:
Alternatives
Does this course sound attractive to you? Would you take something like this?
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