[gchallen]

> Although I do personally prefer that futurecoder rarely shows/tells without actually forcing users to run code and see for themselves, so they always have to be engaged.

Yup. I agree with this approach. However, I think that in some ways this is a weakness of the side-by-side format you're using, since it seems to lean toward more content per example to offset the playground consuming half of the screen area. On https://learncs.online/ we also prefer a "show not tell" approach, but because we're interleaving the text and the playgrounds, sometimes the text between two playgrounds is extremely minimal: "Let's see what happens when we try it another way."

But there is something nice about the side-by-side format.

> Awesome! I've only seen one other place doing something similar: https://scrimba.com/

Yeah, Scrimba makes it weirdly hard to figure out what's going on, given that some of their early examples just have slides popping up everywhere and no actual text editing. I had to fast forward a bit to get to an editing example. And while I think their integration with (I assume) embedded VSCode is really cool, there's a bit of that "seated at the controls of a 747" feeling immediately with their courses, which I think can be a bit frightening for beginners. We like to keep things really compact for a while, and don't have students work in a full IDE until halfway through the semester. (This also avoids the problem with too much IDE help too early, which you referenced in another comment.)