Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Hour of webpages: Now dubbed in French!

Our hour of webpages, which teaches the basics of HTML and CSS, now has French dubbings and fully translated challenges, thanks to our French partner Libraries without Borders. Check it out here! Maybe you can write a better poem than I did. :-)


What can you draw in an hour of JavaScript?

Last week, as part of Hour of Code 2014, we had hundreds of thousands of students learning to make drawing with JavaScript and ProcessingJS. We love seeing what new programmers can make with a little know-how and imagination -- here are some of our favorites:

This mustache'd pig:


This unicorn just casually walking around a rainbow:


This adorable penguin about to get viciously eaten/hugged by a polar bar:


This pink and purple turkey, full of love:


This highly suspicious walrus:

Sunday, December 7, 2014

Hour of Code 2014 on Khan Academy:
Four ways to learn to code, in five languages!

Last year, we were thrilled to participate in the Hour of Code campaign and we had over 1 million students come to Khan Academy to try out coding. We're participating this year again, and we've gone all out.

We have four ways to learn to code in 2014:

  • Hour of Drawing with Code: Students will learn to program using JavaScript, one of the world's most popular programming languages via two great options:
    • Drag-and-drop: Our new experimental block-based coding for younger students with less-developed typing skills and students on tablet devices (ages 8+).
    • Typing: keyboard-based coding for older students (ages 10+), our popular offering from last year.
  • Hour of Webpages: Students will learn to make their own webpages using the basics of HTML and CSS (ages 10+).
  • Hour of Databases: Students will learn the fundamentals of databases using SQL to create tables, insert data into them, and do basic querying (ages 12+).


We've also internationalized those hours into multiple languages: Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, and French.


This is the chance for millions of people, young and old, all around the world, to spend an hour learning to code — to see what it means to create technology instead of just use it. We hope you join us!

Track HTML/CSS progress in coach reports!

We happily announced our HTML/CSS course a few weeks ago. We know that many teachers want their students to learn the basics of webpages and to track their learning progress, so we've added HTML/CSS to the coach experience.

You can select HTML/CSS from the mission picker, if that's the main topic your students are working on:


If you do that, your students will get a notification urging them to start it:


You can filter the student progress for any class to see what they've done in the HTML/CSS course:

When your student's all done, you'll see they've earned the HTML/CSS badge!


We hope these coach resources help more teachers and parents guide their students through learning HTML and CSS.

Saturday, December 6, 2014

Help translate JSHint messages!

In our popular JavaScript/ProcessingJS coding environment, we use JSHint to check for errors in the student's code- often missing semi-colons, misplaced curly brackets, too many semi-colons, that sort of thing.

Next week, we expect to have millions of new students learning programming, and some fraction of them will be international students learning programming before they've learned English. We have the curriculum (talk-throughs and challenges) translated to Spanish, Portuguese, French, Hebrew, and Polish, but we don't have the JSHint messages translated yet!

If you'd like to help those students, here's how you can translate our JSHint messages:

  1. Go to our Khan Academy CrowdIn site and pick the language you'll be translating to.
  2. Click any of the files listed so that you get into the file viewing mode.
  3. Select "Project -> All strings" from the top menu.
  4. Use the search on the left hand side to search for "jshint."
  5. Everything you see should be the JSHint messages. Begin translation!

Thank you so much for anything you can translate!