Bad experience with online programming school LearnStreet

The "learn programming online" space is growing fast. With Treehouse, Codecademy, Code School, Coursera, Udemy, Khan Academy and others, LearnStreet has some stiff competition. Let's take a look at how they stack up.

LearnStreet is pretty new. They launched in public beta in the Fall of 2012 with a million dollars in funding after some time building their idea at a startup incubator. That bodes well for them. It means they have time to build, get feedback, and tweak their product. Considering that their competition has been mostly been around for a year or more, they have a lot of ground to make up. Others were already boasting tens or hundreds of thousands of users before LearnStreet was a blip on the radar.

Cargo-Bot: a fun way to learn programming concepts on iPad

 

There are two ways to learn programming concepts: the fun way and this way. I've tried both and much prefer the fun way. Cargo-Bot is an iPad game that teaches programming concepts by solving increasingly difficult puzzles. However, unlike other puzzle games, this one forces you to think like a computer by limiting your options to only what a computer can do.

The best thing about Cargo-Bot is that it lets you learn programming concepts without the mental weight of learning a programming language. When I was first learning Ruby, Cargo-Bot really helped me understand for-loops, while-loops, recursive functions, arrays, and how to count (yes, you'll need to re-learn how to count when learning to program). And learning all that just felt like playing a (deceptively addictive) puzzle game.

I highly recommend Cargo-Bot if you have an iPad.