Plasmonix, Bambeco receive InvestMaryland funds

Sarah Gantz, Reporter - Baltimore Business Journal

We’ve been working hard over the past four months trying to reimagine Codecademy and we couldn’t be happier to finally unveil it to the world. We have redefined every component under our brand, from a single button on our dashboard to our email template, business cards, slides and even apparel.

We had been discussing a design refresh for a while, but somehow it always ended up being pushed to the side. Finally, in October last year, after completing a user segmentation project that brought to live the main user archetypes of Codecademy.com, it quickly became apparent that if we wanted to grow and mature as a brand, we required a thorough redesign of our entire product.

Why a redesign?

Reason #1 – Start fresh

First, there was the obvious problem of design incoherence and variation. This happened primarily because we lacked a well-defined color and font palette, a uniform visual language for our badges, a unified layout scheme (page types), and a cohesive strategy for all print materials – business cards, postcards, posters, etc. After two and a half years of multiple nip and tuck design fixes and additions, it was time to clean up the house and start fresh. This meant we could finally create an extensible UI pattern library (used and shared by designers and developers) and optimize our new face across multiple platforms by embracing a responsive design layout.

A random sampling of pages within our old web ecosystem, showcasing some visual design inconsistency.

Reason #2 – Brand matureness

Secondly, was the realization that our young startup look and feel was slowly becoming incompatible with our future goals and aspirations. In a time when we are engaged in several partnerships with schools, companies, and governments across the globe, while also continuing to fulfill the needs of our growing user base, our brand should feel a bit more mature, inviting, professional, and sophisticated.

Codecademy’s quirky and undistinguished old logo was created by one of our co-founders in a few minutes by browsing through various fonts in a word processor. The logo featured the giddy lobster font, which has become so popular that is at times compared with Microsoft’s Comic Sans.

Our new look

Phase 1

Back in early November last year, we partnered with our friend Eddie Opara, and his immensely talented team of designers at Pentagram, in order to create a new visual identity that could better reflect the company’s age, ambition, and main attributes.

The first thing we tackled was the logo, as the key centerpiece of our new look. We spent some time talking to our users, colleagues, and our founders Zach and Ryan, to have a solid grasp of Codecademy's perception and future aspirations. After this important research period, we went through several revisions, continuously narrowing down on the mark that best represented our main traits.

While putting the finishing touches to our new logo, we began creating a complementary color, font and iconography palette. It was important to handle all these components simultaneously, so we could delineate a consistent design thread through all of them. Phase 1 gave us the most critical building blocks of our new brand, through our partnership with Pentagram, and marked the beginning of an exclusive in-house development period.

Various early directions for our new logo.

Narrowing down on a few favorite visual marks.

Our final logo with its underlying grid.

Our new graphical language used across the site to indicate different types of content (symbols), actions and controls (icons), and learning achievements (badges).

FF DIN Rounded - Our primary typeface.

Our new color palette.

Phase 2

After defining the main brand pieces with Pentagram (logo, typography, iconography, color), we started applying it internally to our entire web ecosystem by building a comprehensive number of reusable design patterns. For two weeks we built a sizable UI toolkit covering a variety of elements (see below).

Our first attempt at the UI toolkit encompassing only a short amount of elements.

Our growing UI toolkit covering every element, such as header, footer, form fields, button styles, sign up modules, grid, padding, typography, colors, and interactions.

Phase 3

This was the longest, and perhaps most exhausting, of all phases, where we redesigned 70+ webpages in tandem with other collateral material (email templates, slides, apparel, etc). Fortunately, we imposed ourselves a very well defined timeline, with multiple cycles and milestones, which helped us guide through this large task (see sitemap below).

First, we created a comprehensive sitemap of Codecademy.com and then divided the sitemap into four groups, each representing a 2-week delivery cycle. As we redesigned the various pages in each cycle, our brilliant team of developers built our UI styleguide and constructed many of the pages based on the shared design patterns.

Examples of our redesigned pages, from left to right: Enterprise, Stories, Profile.

Examples of our redesigned pages, from left to right: Blog, About, Jobs.

Examples of our redesigned pages, from left to right: Help Center, UK Curriculum, Hour of Code.

Phase 4

Our final phase was all about making sure we were building the thing right. We implemented and tested our new redesign, while in the process getting feedback from our community. We created a huge amount of redlines for all the new material, started experimenting with some versions live on the site, and listened to dozens of comments from our selected users and moderators.

An example of the various comps created to support the accurate implementation of all our redesigned pages.

The beginning

Even though we spent a long time rethinking Codecademy, this hefty work is still unfinished. It certainly provides our team and product with a much-needed fresh face, one that we can feel proud of, and most importantly, one that our users can thoroughly enjoy. But this is just the beginning. We would love to hear what you have to say about our redesign and how we can continue improving our product. We have dozens of ideas to continue pushing this brand foreword. Please keep coming back for more!

Brains Are Like Muscles, and Tackling Complex Skills Like Web Development May Help Strengthen Them

Learning how to program for the first time was a challenge for Adam Waxman.

He worked as a full-time investment banking analyst in Atlanta, but in January 2013, his nights were less about reclining after a day’s work and more about teaching himself Objective-C and JavaScript with books and online tutorials.

By that summer, he left his career in finance behind and moved to New York to enroll in a programming boot camp where he learned Ruby on Rails.

“It’s like learning a foreign language,” says Waxman, 25, a product developer at SeatGeek, a New York ticketing start-up. “It’s much easier to learn a programming language by being very immersive.”

Careers in code and programming are no doubt booming. But are there less-visible benefits? Can a career in software and web development keep you healthy and fit, particularly your brain? Besides agile software development methods, meet-up groups and collaborative projects — which help foster social interactions — programming involves creativity, critical thinking and algorithmic skills necessary to complete tasks.

“When people say they want to learn to program, what they’re really saying is, ‘I want to solve a problem that the computer can help you with,’ ” says Sherif Abushadi, an educator at Dev Bootcamp, who has nearly 13 years of experience teaching development. “In fact, most programmers spend half their time failing over and over and fixing those mistakes until they get it right.”

Early Studies on Brains and Computer Programming

That analytical approach in the context of brain development and computers has been explored for decades.

In 1980, MIT mathematician Seymour Papert, a co-founder of the programming language LOGO, published the pioneering book “Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas.” Papert claimed programming provided children with new opportunities for learning and thinking. A series of studies on the cognitive effects of programming determined that Papert’s claims were problematic, but other research studies like the “Effects of Computer Programming on Cognitive Outcomes,” and those conducted at institutions like MIT, have shown that programming can be beneficial to cognitive development.

Free trial on Treehouse: Do you want to sharpen your web design and development skills? Click here to try a free 14-day trial on Treehouse.

Ongoing empirical studies will be important, of course, but here’s what we know generally about the brain: It’s like a muscle, which means we need to exercise it to conserve brain vitality, according to many research studies cited by the National Institutes of Health.

For some programmers, the ability to simplify complex issues is similar to a brain workout.

“I don’t think it’s something that’s magical, where all of the sudden I feel much smarter, but I do think that programming in general is all about tackling pretty large, unknown problems and breaking it down into smarter pieces that makes sense, ” Waxman says.

Errol King, 29, the director of experience for the kids programming app Beta, says the logical thinking skills he has acquired are transferable outside of the tech world: “The more I go into code, the more I see the world from that perspective.”

It’s not too Late to Train Your Brain

According to research, brain exercises help improve brain function and can possibly fight dementia. But as for brain games — well, science hasn’t exactly jumped on the bandwagon. Still, living a cognitively active lifestyle is never a bad thing — especially when we give our minds and bodies time to relax, says Dr. Sherrie All, a neuropsychologist and founder of the Chicago Center for Cognitive Wellness.

“We grow new brain cells throughout our entire lives and not at a very high rate so you want to keep the ones you have,” she adds.

One way to keep the brain young is learning a new skill. Last year, researchers from the University of Texas at Dallas discovered that mentally challenging activities that you’ve never done before can sharpen the brain.

When we learn a new programming skill — such as Python, PHP, Ruby on Rails, or other complex activities outside of programming like digital photography and juggling — our brains are forming new neural connections while strengthening existing ones each time we practice, according to the National Institutes of Health.

This illustration is from “The Home and School Reference Work, Volume I” by The Home and School Education Society, H. M. Dixon, President and Managing Editor. The book was published in 1917 by The Home and School Education Society. This illustration of the parts of the brain can be found on page 368. The parts are A. Cerebrum; B. Corpus Callosum; C: Medulla Oblongata; D. Arbor-Vitae; E: Cerebellum, F: Pons Varolii (Illustration from Flickr user Sue Clark)

Of course, there will always be tasks we can perform faster when we’re younger, but that doesn’t mean we’re incapable of doing them when we’re older, either. Moreover, professionals in their 40s and 50s are stepping outside of their comfort zones to explore careers in code and programming, which supersedes the misconception that our brains are inflexible.

“As people get older, they actually don’t lose the capacity to learn,” All says. “Our brains are constantly changing up until the point that we die.”She adds:“I’ve learned [to code] before and it’s a really complex brain exercise.”

New York-based actress Ondina Frate, 31, a beginner enrolled in CS50X, an introductory online programming class at Harvard, looks forward to the challenges of the training.

“It’s not as tough in the first week, but then it’s starts [getting] harder,” she says. “It’s very precise and detailed. You have you be very analytical.”

There are no shortages of Meetup groups or tech organizations, including New York Entrepreneurs & Startup Network, Just Dev It and Silicon Valley NewTech, all of which offer support and networking opportunities to programmers, developers, and coders.

“It’s also very comforting to know that there are other beginners, too, and if you don’t know something, you can talk about it,” Frate says.

Researchers from the Rush University Medical Center and University of Michigan found that similar social connections are advantageous for brain health. Like other social environments, exchanges in tech communities are exercises for the brain because of social and language skills essential to having a conversation.

“I think that when a lot of people think of programmers,” Waxman says. “They think of a nerdy guy or women alone that’s probably trying to do something all by themselves when the beauty of code is that you’re making something [together] that can help a lot of people in everyday life.”

The post Can Computer Programming Boost Your Brain Power? appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

Two years ago, we started building a product that would help teach people the skills they needed to succeed in a digital world. As more than 24 million people took Codecademy courses on our web and iOS platforms, we too learned and grew. Now, we’re excited to show you our latest project — a new Codecademy designed from the ground up, aimed to help you learn skills hands-on, with real projects, and constant feedback. Better yet, the new Codecademy experience helps to connect you with the real skills you’ll need to succeed in today’s workplace.

Learning isn’t just about one exercise or “class,” but instead is a gateway to community, opportunities, ideas, and a better life. We’ve witnessed this through the millions of learners on Codecademy and through the thousands of inspiring teachers who have shared their knowledge with the world with our course creator. We listened to them while building what we think is the best learning experience — for anyone, anywhere — to learn the most important skills of today.

In two years, Codecademy has scaled to become larger than we had ever imagined. Our learners, spread across the globe in every country in the world, have:

• written more than a billion lines of code
• joined more than 24 million others in starting the journey of learning to code
• helped to create more than 100,000 courses using our course creator
• hosted meetups in more than 350 cities
• learned on-the-go through our mobile apps for iPhone and iPad, both of which have been featured in the App Store
• worked with nearly 100 partner organizations like The White House and Twitter to both learn and spread their knowledge even further

Today, we’re proud to show off the results of all of that to a few friends and, within days, the rest of the world. The first fruits of this effort are an experience that gets you from knowing nothing to building a website — in this case, Airbnb’s homepage. Along the way, you’ll experiment with blocks of code, see the results of adding and subtracting different parts of a page, and use the real terminology that developers and designers all over the world over use to create websites just like Airbnb’s.

Our new platform leaves you not just with new knowledge, but with a portfolio of projects you can share with your friends, enabling them to learn from you. We’ve even built the capability for you to share your work with future employers, and to demonstrate your new skills. We’ve been testing our new learning interface for weeks and we’ve seen it applied in an amazing number of ways — from designers at major firms winning new consulting work because of their ability to build their designs to students in high school making personal webpages for themselves.

Codecademy’s learning experience comes not just from the data behind 24 million learners and billions of lines of code, but also from the individual stories we’ve heard from our wealth of committed learners. Former book critic Juliet Waters, for instance, started learning with her 11-year old son as part of our Code Year program in 2012. Since then, she’s gone on to chronicle her journey in a book that’s coming soon, noting that programming helped her feel “more connected with others in our tech-driven society.” A parent named Shari told us that her 11 and 13-year old sons had a “reaction to what they are learning [that] beats their enthusiasm for the [video games].” We work hard everyday to deliver a similar experience for our users all around the world — with more than 65% of users outside the US, it’s important to us that we’re democratizing access to the fundamental blocks of knowledge that can improve peoples’ lives.

Tommy Nicholas’ story is just the sort we’re hoping our new learning environment will foster: he began with almost no programming knowledge at all, and gained enough skills to develop a website, Coffitivity, that was named one of TIME Magazine’s Top 50 websites in 2013.

Billions of lines of code, millions of users, and years after our founding, we’ve been astonished by what people can do when they can easily learn the fundamental skills that can transform their lives. Today, we’ve redesigned Codecademy to reflect that potential — and hopefully to help more people reach their goals and build the future they want to live in.

If you want to help us, we're hiring!