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Good point. A few weeks ago I made a similar point here on HN, that web dev is good for starting. Given more thoughts, I am fairly conflicted/confused about web apps vs Python :) Web apps, as you've said, are pretty straightforward, minimal setup, extremely easy to relate to. I guess many folks who aren't familiar with coding have an idea for web site or two. That makes it a great motivator, no doubt. If a friend asked where to start, I'd probably point to this direction. HTML5 games is a pretty good choice too, and Phaser is a neat framework to start with. However, there are a few problems with this approach. First, most of the development/studying would be more about the details of browsers/jQuery/javascript itself. How to get the content of this input, how to attach this event, etc. The problem is that it doesn't do much to teach the mindset of programming. You know, when to apply for loop, when while loop, etc. The other problem is that web dev is moving much much faster than most of the education systems in the world. In 2010, you probably would have taught about jQuery. In 2015, you probably would use vanilla JS as it's good enough, modern browsers are following the standards well enough. And then you have all the html5 elements (video, etc), css3 properties which are fairly important nowadays but didn't exist 5 years ago (or the browser support was poor). So, web dev might work quite well for motivated individuals and equally motivated teachers but probably less so for mainstream education (i.e. highschools). |