Start playing, learn coding
Grasshopper is a learn-to-code app released by Area 120, Google's incubator.
One may feel coding has never been this fun while their fingers go running through the screen on Grasshopper. A new app has come from Google’s two-year-old internal incubator, Area 120, where coding can be learned through games. Beginners get to find some simple steps to master JavaScript. The app provides bite-sized puzzles and quizzes that actually are lessons to get acquainted with one of the complex processes in a programmer’s life. Gradually, it helps imbibe the skills to build a website.
JavaScript being a favourite for a majority of professional developers, the team is concentrating on sprucing up its possibilities.
Sign in to the Google account first. It begins with offering ‘The Fundamentals’, where the learner gets a hang of terminologies like functions, variables, strings, for loops, arrays, conditionals, operators, and objects. It moves on to the lessons to draw shapes using the D3 library and then goes to the more complex functions.
“The further along you get, the more complicated the puzzles become. The app will also ask if you’d like to set a practice schedule and get reminders daily or a couple of times a week so you don’t lose any recently learned skills,” Tech news site The Verge writes.
Going by the user review (see pic), Grasshopper has become a hot favourite in quick time. It shows people not related to the tech field are also testing the waters and finding it fun. The makers have set it right to help the learner in as many ways it can.
“Each time the student runs code, they’re given real-time feedback to help guide them towards solving the challenge.
Many students have told us that this real-time feedback feels like a tutor, since the feedback feels so tailored to the student’s current state,” Laura Holmes, founder of Grasshopper, is quoted by tech portal Techcrunch.
Area 120 has mostly been working in silence and released products such as Advr (an advertising format for VR), Tailor (personal stylist) and Supersonic (emoji messenger) in the meantime. A job-matching service in Bangladesh; Appointments, a booking tool and the YouTube co-watching app UpTime were also made by them.
Just three days online, the app marked 100K downloads. Compatible for Android and iPhone devices, Grasshopper is available for free on Playstore and iOS.