#649 overall
Introduction to Computer Science
Khan Academy
1 recommender · 1 thread · recommended in 1 year, 2025 · score 0.7
Khan Academy's free introductory computer science course, built around its in-browser JavaScript programming environment, where learners write small programs, read others' projects, and get feedback from the community. It covers programming fundamentals through interactive tutorials and projects.
One commenter credits the Khan Academy CS tutorials as the way they got started as a kid, and praises the responsive community that comments on learners' programs.
CS Fundamentals & Systemsbeginnerfreeinteractive MOOC#javascript#programming basics#interactive tutorials#khan academy#community feedback
Recommendations by year
20062026
My start was a mix of Khan Academy and a laptop with a broken screen.
My mom's computer screen broke when it got dropped on the ground, but it still had a working VGA port. So, she reached out to someone in our congregation who did sysadmin work who installed Ubuntu 12.04 on it. He also helped get a LAMP stack installed locally, and set up a server that I could deploy code to. It was funny since there was little 10 year old me lugging around a chunky monitor with this laptop everywhere I went.
I was homeschooled, so I got an hour of computer time every day as long as I was doing something productive. The Khan Academy CS course had just been released, so my dad helped me get started, and I consumed those tutorials! I also got to check out other people's projects and tweak random numbers to see what happened. The KA community is incredible, since you can comment on others' programs and they're pretty responsive.
Another fun thing was doing Minecraft modding (shout out to bedrock miners' tutorials!). To this day I'm shocked that my 12 year old self was writing java code like that, but I suppose I was mainly just copying and pasting code, lol.
There's so many little projects in various languages I did (tried and failed to make an android app, tried to make a couple JS games but was bad at finishing stuff, made SVN for Khan Academy, read some random books on clojure and elixir, started but never completed an inventory management system for my aunt). But, when I think back, Khan Academy on that old laptop really kicked it off.