I started CodeCast because I wanted to deliver an excellent experience to my students. When I was teaching at a Vancouver Bootcamp, I noticed many students were having a hard time keeping up 100% if they are coding along or even if they are not. This happens usually because as a developer you work on multiple files at a given time and while switching from a file to another. Some students may get lost and miss some code in a particular file and this can leave them stuck.
So I worked with a graduate to build the first prototype called CodeCast. I’ve introduced it in my classroom and it was significantly improved the code learning experience with my students.
After seeing how powerful CodeCast is, I realized it could be a lot more than a classroom tool. That’s why I decided to assemble a team to work on CodeCast fulltime. My goal is to help students and make their experience learn code easier!
What is CodeCast
Our core product is a teaching and learning tool for developers. It works by displaying real-time changes to source code that are synchronized with streamed or recorded video. Instead of watching a screen-share while tediously cross-referencing source code examples elsewhere, a learner can explore a full live copy of the example project as it changes throughout a session and replay it in full as a study reference. Imagine read-only google docs, displaying a full project structure, with code diffs, a history, and with synced screenshare alongside.
The Problem CodeCast is solving
Watching a stream or video lecture of someone showing code examples is somewhat effective, but the viewer can’t copy and paste from video or view different files in a project. Typically a Github repo will be shared with a video tutorial, and learners are required to manually navigate to a point in time in the code and cross-reference the video. This is tedious and gets in the way of the learning experience. All but the most motivated learners default to watching the video only, missing the value of interactive learning.
CodeCast synchronizes live or recorded video with changes to an example project in real-time, and wraps it in a familiar text editor-like web interface that is optimized for learning. Learners can watch video content but also view and copy the code as needed to test examples.
When a video has a full project tree alongside it, it doesn’t require the same quality of production to be useful. With content being less expensive and tedious to produce, CodeCast can capture the newest, most relevant content that learners want before full video courses are eventually produced.
We envision that in the future many of the popular coding platforms will embed CodeCasts rather than plain video for enhanced coding education.
Our Goal
I’ve used CodeCast in my own classroom and show how effective it was in improving the learning experience for my students. I want to share this with more teachers and content creators. I want to improve the learning experience for all students. And I sincerely believe CodeCast can do that. I hope you can give it a try!
What’s next?
I’m currently working on creating workshops using CodeCast for the tech community.
- Rails Deep Dive: One-day workshop
- Elixir Deep Dive
- Javascript Deep Dive
You can learn more about these workshops on CodeCast.io
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