Online learning is the industry that literally saved traditional education in this year of COVID-19 Pandemy. More and more schools, colleges, and universities are creating their own platforms for learning on the Internet. Moreover, educational institutions are actively learning to use external educational platforms. Fortunately, educational sites often reciprocate traditional schools by creating special preferential programs for students and their teachers.
One of these sites is the CodeGym, which hosts an interactive hands-on Java programming course. In the 2020/2021 academic year, CodeGym initiated an educational project to help high school, college, and university students learn Java in an effective way. As part of the campaign, students will receive free access to the CodeGym interactive Java course during the school year.
“For a long time, I was a critic of traditional education, considering it too inertial, theorized, divorced from real life. This was especially true for such a dynamic area as IT: the traditional school’s curricula simply do not keep up with the speed of IT development. Students are often graduated with the knowledge that is known to be outdated for real work. Fortunately, the situation is gradually changing. Formal educational institutions have already agreed that innovation is inevitable! Excellent university courses created by programming enthusiasts and practitioners are emerging. For example, Harvard CS50, I am a big fan of this one.
When I started developing an interactive programming course, first of all, I wanted to create such a platform that I really missed while studying at the university. So you could say CodeGym was born out of the dreams of a university IT student”, said Dmytro Vezhnin, CEO of CodeGym.
“Our team has been thinking of collaborating with educational institutions for a long time. I know that many teachers recommend CodeGym to their students as a practical Java course. In addition, we occasionally do surveys and it turns out that quite a few CodeGym students are currently in colleges and high schools. I presume, 2020 is the best time to start ”, added Alex Yelenevych, CMO of CodeGym.
What is CodeGym for Educational structures?
CodeGym is a well structured online Core Java course. It contains short yet informative lectures, and over 1200 coding tasks of varying complexity, from the simplest “hello, world” to small projects such as job aggregator, link shortener, restaurant management system, Snake and Sokoban-like video Games.
Gamification. Elements of gamification are built into the course: a plot is woven into the lectures, which, however, does not distract from the main action – learning programming. Each CodeGym student has an alter ego, the Amigo robot, whose programming skills need to be pumped from level 0 to 40. To beat the level a student needs to solve a certain number of problems and get enough dark matter (special points to reach a new lecture or a new level). Achievements are also included.
Smart validation or “Virtual CodeGym mentor”. CodeGym contains a virtual smart system to verify student solutions, to give recommendations and tips, and help to fix mistakes.
Pretty often students suffer from the constant busyness of their professors. Sometimes they should wait for weeks for them to check the coding tasks or advice on how to improve the solution.
The fact is that most of the errors of beginners are very similar, so the reaction to them can be automated, as well as recommendations for correcting them. This is how the “virtual CodeGym mentor” works. It can help the SC teachers, leaving them with deeper lectures and complex projects.
Class progress monitoring is a special tool for teachers to track the progress of the students.
Class leaderboard. All students in the course are displayed in the overall ranking. The rating depends on the number of solved problems and passed levels.
IntellijIDEA integration. Students can use the most popular professional Java IDE IntelliJ IDEA for their job with CodeGym.
How to join CodeGym Educational Initiative
If you are a High School, College, or University teacher, you can join CodeGym Educational Initiative for free. Go to the link and fill out the application form. Once confirmed, you and your students will have access to the course.