The Crowd-Teaching Approach To Code Training

Codio:Annotations is a new training tool that is hoped to change the way coding is taught by the educational sector and the online community at large. Developers and students alike can build interactive tutorials and code samples from directly within an IDE, and then share them with the community.

The product bids to "changes online tutorials forever" by replacing lengthy text and static code blocks with non-linear collaborative "post-curriculum" resources that will be constantly iterated by the community.

"We live in a digital age where our interaction with computers grows more and more every day," comments Freddy May, CEO and founder of Codio. "We propose an alternative solution — no curriculum. We believe that rigid curriculums designed by committee are not compatible with the dynamic world of IT. A rigid approach is simply not the best way to learn to code, as by the time a curriculum has been published, it's likely already out-of-date."

"We want to build on the momentum already achieved by the likes of the Raspberry Pi project and initiatives like Code.org to ensure that everyone is given the opportunity to learn to code. We believe that by empowering the world's coding community to take charge of its own destiny in the way it knows best — through collaboration and sharing — a post-curriculum approach really is the best way to teach people to code. We might be wrong, but we believe this 'crowd-teaching' approach is a better solution to the problem than one designed by committee. But we want your feedback," said May.

Codio will be working with the community to build additional crowd-teaching resources including a GitHub-based content framework for content creation and collaboration; a standard educational license that all content should use allowing completely unrestricted copying and modifications for educational use; and an active curation program backed by Codio staff that will provide guidance for any programming language.