Everybody here is complaining about the money thing but I'm just bothered that the "platform" seems to be paradoxically...not programmable enough.
I mean, there's been a lot of criticism about codeacademy's populist ambitions lately, and the core of them to me is that you can't bridge regular johny's knowledge to programming knowledge by just presenting them with an esoteric text adventure in a javascript command line. People can't be so easily compelled to play text adventures nowadays, especially if the game commands don't relate at all to their everyday language and experience.
I think in order to produce succesful learning experiences for noobs, which is what they seem to be aspiring to (I mean, maybe Mayor Bloomberg has a hacker soul, who knows), you have to give them a real inmediate need for it. Like - when Myspace forced everybody to learn to get under the hood to customize their profiles. Myspace created more programming literacy among non-coders than I think Codeacademy ever could if it remained like this!
They have to offer fundamentally different ways of giving lessons if they really want to get there, other than command line games. Someone out there mentioned ifttt.com being a better way to learn about programming basics and getting people interested in the possibilities. I can think of a few others.
As I said I have not looked too much into what their lesson framework looks like, but if they offer a choice between js, ruby and python...that's already too narrow. If """we""" want to educate the general population about programming, it has to be way broader than that, and the framework that supports such education has to be more programmable
Mayor Bloomberg was a hacker actually. He started out working in a financial company, saw a need for a better way of getting information and quit to build the Bloomberg terminals which turned into the Bloomberg company.
Good point about MySpace -- I think you're spot on.
Teaching the general population how to code is a pipe dream. There is a hard limit on the number of people who can (and want to) become programmers, even at the hobbyist level.
These sites are great as accelerators for those who would eventually learn to code no matter how hard or inconvenient the process was. The sites are also a great way to introduce programming to people who otherwise wouldn't have known they'd enjoy it. But I think we're kidding ourselves if we believe that even 25% of the people signed up for Code Year actually start coding. Programming (not programming quizzes) is hard. People, in general, don't like to do hard things.
As I said I have not looked too much into what their lesson framework looks like, but if they offer a choice between js, ruby and python...that's already too narrow. If """we""" want to educate the general population about programming, it has to be way broader than that, and the framework that supports such education has to be more programmable