Khan Academy now with Computer Science courses

The Khan Academy is a free online learning resource with more than 3000 educational videos. Everyone is welcome to join any course or lesson on the site. Up until now, the focus has been largely on math with other science thrown into the mix for good measure. What makes the academy interesting is not only the free approach to education, but more than that the way lessons are taught. The idea is to make the lessons understandable to users of all experience levels, provided that users either start at the very beginning for a good foundation, or skip classes provided they are already proficient in a certain field. The courses are even understandable if you have never had a lesson of math or science in your life before.

Today the Khan Academy launched their much anticipated Computer Science program which at the time of writing offers 14 different computer science related tutorials. The preferred programming language of choice is JavaScript, but instead of walking you through a step by step instructional course that covers the basic foundations of JavaScript, all commands and examples, you step right into the programming.

Probably the best way to get a feel for the course and concept is to watch the welcome to Computer Science video that introduces you to the course and some of the basic concepts of the JavaScript language.

It is recommended to follow the course in the right order as it is building up on previous lessons. If you skip lessons you will have a much harder time following the instructions as you may be missing essential information that were explained and taught in previous lessons.

A total of 14 lessons are available right now that walk you through some of the basics of the JavaScript language. This includes using variables, understanding Boolean operators, animations and drawing. What is interesting is that you can modify code and output in real time to get a better understanding of the concepts. Below the introductory video for instance you find the code on the left and the actual output on the right. While you won't see all of the code, you get to play around with some of the variables to change the position or color of elements. A pretty powerful environment to better understand how variables and code changes impact the output.

Here is the launch video that you may be interesting in.

New lessons and courses will be posted on a regular basis. For now, the Computer Science course is nowhere near complete as that offered by Udacity and maybe even Academic Earth. The latter is however less interactive and consists mainly of videos that you can watch.

Advertisement