Code School vs CheckiO

After each video, there are a series of challenges that give you a chance to apply what you just learned. The great thing about these challenges are that they force you to think through a problem, and use the new skills to solve it. It's not just regurgitating facts; it requires some effort.

While you can jump into any video you like, there is also the option to follow a path for what you are wanting to learn. These give a nice direction if you are wanting to improve on a particular area and guide you into what to do next. They currently offer Ruby, Javascript, HTML/CSS, and iOS.

Soup to Bits is a series of videos that shows a developer creating an app from scratch in real time. It's easy to pause a video and follow along with the developer.

Videos give an overview of the course/lesson plan before a single line of code is written. This gives context and a general understanding of what is possible and how teaching will be approached.

The instructors often use humour throughout the videos while letting their passion for the topic show.

Code School is not just for beginners to programming, but provides plenty of intermediate and advanced courses for students as their skills grow.

Users can publish their solutions for different problems and other users can review the code and give their opinions on how they would have solved the problem.

Sometimes, some of the most active users get their code reviewed by Guido Van Rossum (the creator of the Python language) himself.

CheckiO crowdsources translations for problems. Currently problems have been translated in 10 languages. So it's highly possible that eventually more languages will be supported.

New missions can be created and uploaded using GitHub. After that is done, it's suggested to CheckiO and if it fills all the requirements after being reviewed by a CheckiO team member, it's pulled into the game.