How it started
If you’ve ever tried to teach yourself programming, this might sound familiar.
You find a video. It’s going great until minute nine, when the presenter says “and obviously you’d use a closure here.”
You look up closures. The top answer is from 2014 and uses three more words you don’t know.
You try the official documentation. It’s very complete. It’s also written for people who already understand it.
Two weeks later you have twelve tabs open, a folder called learn-js-FINAL-2, and you still couldn’t say what a variable is.
The trouble was never you. Nobody had put the pieces in order.
So we started a school
Schools worked this out a long time ago. You don’t hand a five-year-old a chemistry textbook. You start with counting, and you build up.
The School of Scriptology works the same way. It opens in Preschool, with what JavaScript is and why it’s everywhere, and runs all the way to College, where you build small apps of your own. In between there are twenty grades, a test at the end of each one, and a Summer School that is entirely about bugs, because everybody needs one.
CurlyScript turns the school into a game: short questions, an explanation after every answer, hearts, streaks, and Professor Curly, a curly brace who teaches you and gets new hats as you learn.
Here’s how Grade 1 explains a variable:
Moving house? You put your books in a box and write BOOKS on it. Later you find your books by the label, without opening every box.
A variable is exactly that: a named box that holds a value.
The First Rule of Scriptology
Run it and see.
When you’re not sure what a piece of code does, don’t stare at it. Run it. Change one thing, then run it again. That’s why most examples in our notes have a Run button, and why you can watch them run one line at a time.
What we promise, and what we don’t
We promise
- Every lesson is free, for good. Plus, in the apps, only adds extras on top.
- An explanation after every answer, right or wrong.
- New ideas in order, each one built on the last.
- No account needed to learn, and nothing collected about children.
We don’t promise
- That you’ll be a senior developer by Friday. Learning to program takes months of practice, whatever the ads say.
- That it will always be easy. Some grades are hard. That’s what Summer School is for.
- Shortcuts. There aren’t any. There are good explanations and lots of practice, and they work.
An error message is a clue. Some clues are just written very rudely.
Where we are now
CurlyScript is in early access. The whole school is free on this website while we learn what works and what doesn’t. Android and iPhone apps come next.
We’d love to hear what you think, especially the bits that confused you. Write to us at contact@example.com.
Class starts whenever you’re ready
Lesson one takes a few minutes, and your progress saves as you go.