I have to day I’m quite enjoying Code Year, although its promise to send a weekly email to prompt starting the next session has proven rather patchy.

Of course, I’ve written basic Javascript before – or perhaps to be  more accurate, more often picked up code ideas from other people and modified them – and as far as I’ve got so far, the concepts have not been especially new.   But working steadily through the process (which is written as a series of exercises gradually embedding and explaining concepts, using an interactive code window and output console within the exercise web page) is embedding the knowledge more fully.

And then there’s the motivation factor: I’ve no particular intention of writing all that much Javascript at work, and the ability to code is unlikely to be a major factor in any future job applications.  But the ability to do more with my own websites, and the desire not to get left behind as the year of code progresses, adds a motivation level difficult to achieve in working through just any web-based JS tutorial.

There’s been criticism of Code Year – basically that it doesn’t train people to be professional programmers; and of course it doesn’t; it gives people a basis of understanding of a programming language, which they can take further or not, as they wish.  Perhaps it takes away some of the mystique of programming; perhaps too it will give some a taster from which they will see that professional coding is a far deeper skill.

To me it’s a Good Thing; not everyone who starts on it will benefit, but for some it may be a step towards understanding that computers are there to be programmed, not to control us; and towards understanding that we can control them.      It’s certainly several steps above the ‘How to use MS Office’ propaganda that passes for ICT in many secondary schools!