Codecademy's Zach Sims argues programming is a 21st-century literacy that schools teach five to ten years too late. He built the company on hands-on learning and peer support, rejecting lecture-based instruction as outdated for the internet era.
Chapters
We built a way for people that didn't have any coding knowledge to become proficient as quickly as possible online in a community of their peers. One of the key things about Codecademy and why it spread so quickly is that it's so easy to start learning by doing. We decided to build net-native education, the education the internet deserves, not education that you take off from offline and bring online. So we scrapped all the things we didn't like about the offline educational experience and embraced the maxim that you learn more from your friends outside of the classroom than you do from lectures inside the classroom. We wanted to build net-native education for everyone, 21st century literacy. We're all walking around with phones, with computers, with tablets in our bag, but we're consuming things on them instead of creating things on them. The problem with programming being 21st century literacy along with reading, writing, and math, is that it's not taught in schools. Institutions are 5 to 10 years behind the reality of what people want in the workforce, of what they need to learn in order to be productive members of the workforce.
