Khan Academy just announced that we're looking for fellows in many new content areas, and we're excited that Computer Science is one of them!
As a CS content fellow, you would spend one year creating and curating content for our Computer Science subject - improving the current topics and bringing in new ones, potentially partnering with experts (like we did with Dartmouth on our Algorithms content).
We're looking for fellows that have experience teaching CS, especially at the intro college level, and love designing great learning experiences. Interested? Learn more and apply!
SQL stands for "Structured Query Language" and it's the standard way to interact with relational databases, a way we store data in apps and websites. Like if we actually had a database of all the people in the world and the things they use, we could find out the exact number who use SQL with a query like this:
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM people WHERE things_they_use LIKE "%sql%";
It's not just the database admins that are using it; it's the engineers that are writing code to send data to it, it's the product managers that are making decisions based on it, it's the marketing managers checking if their campaign was successful.
So that's why we decided to teach SQL on Khan Academy. We think it's the kind of skill that a huge range of people can use in their everyday life, and even if they don't, it's a great introduction to data storage and manipulation.
We started with just an Hour of SQL back in December, and based on its popularity, we're releasing a full introductory SQL course today. You'll learn more ways to query complex data, how to join data across multiple tables, how to update and delete data, and see a lot of real world examples along the way. And of course, like with all of our programming courses, you'll be writing the SQL yourself in our interactive editor.
Whether you're learning SQL for work or play, we hope you'll join us! Get started with the welcome video, or if you already did the Hour of SQL, jump in on the advanced queries tutorial:
I just watched this TEDx talk where a kid shares his story of learning English and then learning JS on Khan Academy (fast-forward to 4:20):
It's awesome how much people can learn on the internet with enough motivation. Hopefully, we'll keep building out our translations so that more people can learn to code before they even learn English.
I'm starting weekly programming office hours for the Khan Lab School, and today was my first time down there, helping the mixed age students with their challenges and projects. As I helped them debug their programs, I realized that other teachers and TAs could benefit from my strategies for debugging programs together. That's why I ran home and wrote this classroom debugging guide. Enjoy, and let me know if you have any tips to add!
In November, we released the algorithms course, a combination of articles, visualizations, quizzes, coding challenges, a few creative projects. Today we turned on the project evaluations page for algorithms, so that our community can see the neat projects that learners are coming up with, and help evaluate the projects.
Here are some of my favorites I've seen so far:
We now have a real-time, interactive editing environment on Khan Academy for JS/ProcessingJS, HTML, and SQL. Last year, we decided to make the editing environment open source on Github, to share how it works and encourage others to contribute. We've since had multiple contributors, and the most prolific, Kevin Barbarash, joined KA as a full-time employee.
