A parental code that gets adults talking the language

LIKE A lot of adults who have heard about CoderDojo ( Coderdojo.com), James Whelton's wonderful Irish initiative to teach children how to code, you might be feeling a little left out.

CoderDojo has had phenomenal success in introducing children to computer programming in a way that is fun, challenging and, perhaps most critically, cool.

It has been so successful that it has already spread beyond the borders of this nation, to places as varied as the US, India, Japan, South Africa, Brazil, Uganda, the UK, and more.

While an adult needs to accompany a child to CoderDojo coding sessions, the problem – at least, as many of us see it – is that the kids get to have all the fun, and the adults are just there for transport and support.

Now, CoderDojo is absolutely right in putting us in the back seat on this one. But an awful lot of us adults have looked on longingly from the sidelines, wishing that we could get our hands (metaphorically) dirty with code as well.

Personally, I think there would actually be quite a lot of grown-up interest if the kids would feel sorry for us and allow some adult branches of CoderDojo.

So many of the classes that are out there for adults are really geared to people who already have some skill, and know what they’re doing.

What a lot of us want – that's me raising my hand at the back of the class – is a really fun and simple introduction to coding, and a great environment in which to try out new things: exactly what CoderDojo does for kids. While we wait and hope, there is a self-teaching alternative for all of us grown-ups, however. It's the online Codecademy initiative ( Codecademy.com), based out of the US. It's a free, fun and gentle introduction to computer coding, over a year-long course, that provides a lesson a week that people can follow at their own speed and in their own time. Like CoderDojo, the intention of Codecademy is really to get students coding, with the goal of being able to write an app and create a website within a year, or less. But, handily, online nobody knows you're a grown-up, so you can sneak in and dig right into this course, too.

Once you sign up, you can jump straight into your first lesson which has the wonderful benefit of getting you started with some basic code, without you even realising that that’s what you’re doing.

You also get to do all of your trial-and-error work inside a little JavaScript “sandbox” online, so you can see whether you’ve coded correctly or made a mistake. Happily, you can make lots of mistakes without having anyone looking over your shoulder and making you feel embarrassed, which generally matters a lot more to grown-ups than to kids, for some stupid reason.

And the lessons are a lot of fun. The initial weeks take you through some basic JavaScript programming, and by your 12th lesson you’re ready to build a blackjack game. Now, that’s pretty impressive for any of us who’ve never done much more than dabble in code, if even that.

By this point, you’ll also have had a basic introduction to object-oriented programming. Throw that into a sentence, and impress your friends – even the ones who can code expertly. After that, you also get lessons in HTML (hypertext markup language) and CSS (cascading style sheets) so that you can start designing a webpage.

For those of us from way back, who learned some HTML to create webpages but found CSS confusing and complicated, these lessons are great, refreshing rusty HTML knowledge while making CSS a lot less fearsome.

The latest lesson has begun an introduction to the general-purpose coding language Python, very productively broadening out the range of coding knowledge that followers of this course are getting.

Another great feature is that many developers have submitted their own free lessons to the site, so that coders following the course (or anyone with some coding knowledge) can learn how to apply what they have learned to complete a project or gain related knowledge. For example, one unit teaches students how to create collapsing message panels in JavaScript, while another instructs in algorithm efficiency.

One thing that I’ve found handy is that once you sign up for the course and if, like me, you tend to get busy with other things and neglect your weekly lesson, you keep getting prompts to come back to pursue your lessons. Without such mild encouragement, I’ve found it’s easy to have good intentions, but quickly forget to keep up with online training classes.

I hope that eventually we grown-ups will have an adult CoderDojo or similar place to go where we can code in the company of other like-minded folks. But in the meantime, see if you don’t have a heck of a lot of fun, and learn a lot, with Codecademy.

You might even impress your kids.