Make the PJS course clearer that it's a PJS course

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Willard

September 30, 2020 21:16

On Khan Academy, there's 5 JS courses with the "JS" label in the computer programming category, and of those, 3 of them specifically teach ProcessingJS. That wouldn't be a problem, except that it creates a large amount of confusion about what JS really is and how it works. I made a popular game in the webpage environment, and I couldn't tell you how many times people have commented "Wow how did you do this in HTML?" or "Why did you do this in HTML instead of JS?" In fact there's only about 10 lines of boilerplate HTML, and the rest is JavaScript. Yesterday somebody asked me why "round" and "map" didn't work in JS because they thought surely something as fundamental as math would be consistent, but they were wrong.

People going through the JS course don't realize the fundamental fact that JavaScript is for adding functionality to webpages. They think that PJS is JS, and that creates problems when transitioning to real JavaScript.

I really like the PJS course, and think it's a good introduction to programming. But it needs to be more clear about what it's actually teaching learners, so that they don't think they actually know JS when all they know is PJS.

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Quinn Hardbrook

October 01, 2020 14:36
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I’ve been dealing with this problem since I started answering questions and was myself confused with it when first learning JS outside of Processing.

Khan Academy teaches JS via Processing because it’s engaging for kids to be able to draw with programming and encourages them to learn the actually JS part. Unfortunately, they don’t tell the same kids what parts they’ll use in the real world and what they probably won’t.

This is definitely an issue that needs to be addressed.
Alexandre Chami Filho

June 23, 2021 14:44
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Hello!

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on our presentation of the PJS and JS courses. It is very insightful! I've passed this feedback along to the appropriate team to review not only this section but also any other courses that might need a boost.

As we grow and expand, we’re continuing to improve our content to offer a better education at Khan Academy. Investing more heavily in the content team is actually one of our major initiatives.

Thank you for being part of our community!
LeaferStudios

July 18, 2021 22:37
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When I was younger I used to play around with Brackets. I remember how I once created a JS file and typed in basic pJS code (wanted to create a website showcasing my games). It obviously didn't run so I stopped programming outside of Khan Academy because I thought JavaScript files were "broken". While it is possible to import games made on KA to HTML the experience left a bad taste on my mouth about real-life programming.

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Make the PJS course clearer that it's a PJS course

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