This week, Google’s Area 120 has released a new app named as “Grasshopper” which is specially designed to teach adults how to code JavaScript on their smartphones.
Grasshopper, however, won’t teach you enough to quit your day job and start coding JavaScript for a living. But, rather it is quite a fun tool that helps you get started and also helps you decide whether you want to continue your education with online courses or not.
The company said in a blog post on Wednesday:
“Coding is becoming such an essential skill, and we want to make it possible for everyone to learn even when life gets busy. We made Grasshopper to help folks like you get into coding in a fun and easy way”.
According to the app’s website:
“We put Grasshopper on a phone so you can turn your commute or waiting in line into a learning moment”.
The app is created with the aim to get coders talented in the basics and core concepts, so they can move towards next step in their coding educations.
According to the coders who have worked on Grasshopper, it is to make coding feel fun and approachable as it increasingly is becoming a necessary skill.
Said by coders:
“Grasshopper was created by a team of passionate coders from Google’s workshop for experimental products, Area 120. Coding is becoming such an essential skill, and we want to make it possible for everyone to learn even when life gets busy. We made Grasshopper to help folks like you get into coding in a fun and easy way”.
How Grasshopper Works
Grasshopper works perfectly with bite-sized puzzles and quizzes that take you through a bunch of lessons each day when you have some extra time. After logging in to your Google account, you would walk through several basic coding definitions, and start your exercise then. The more along you get, the more difficult the puzzles become. Interestingly, if you want to set a practice schedule and get reminders – daily or a plenty of times a week, Grasshopper has got you covered. Even it won’t let you lose any recently learned skills.
Grasshopper itself offers a series of courses such as “The Fundamentals” where users learn how the code actually works, along with various terminologies i.e. functions, variables, strings, arrays, conditionals, operators, and objects.
The app has two more courses which help coders learn to draw shapes using the D3 library and later create more multifaceted using D3.
