Learn Relational Databases by Building a Mario Database - Build a Mario Database not opening as it used to, forced to open with Gitpod?

freeCodeCamp Support
1

Tell us what’s happening:

Describe your issue in detail here.

Yesterday I could learn " Learn Relational Databases by Building a Mario Database" from my browser. A new page would open up where I can view what I am doing through a virtual machine and follow along a interactive tutorial.

Today when I wanted to continue my progress I had to create a Gitpod account. Ok. I got it, connected my linked in for extra time, and even installed all the extensions my microsoft visual studio code had recommended me to take the lesson eg CodeRoad.

Nothing familiar loaded up so I closed it, ended the session from Gitpod, and reopened " Learn Relational Databases by Building a Mario Database" from freeCodeCamp again. Nothing. All gitpod did was open my VSCode for me and applied its themes and open the project folder to the side… But no interactive tutorial ever popped up like it did last time.

Your code so far

Your browser information:

User Agent is: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/121.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Challenge Information:

Learn Relational Databases by Building a Mario Database - Build a Mario Database

2

This is the new version, as CodeAlly wasn’t warking really well

There are new instructions in the page to follow

  1. Create a GitHub account if you don’t have one
  2. Click the start button below
  3. Login to Gitpod with your GitHub account if you aren’t already
  4. Once the virtual Linux machine is finished loading, start the CodeRoad extension by:
  • Clicking the “hamburger” menu near the top left of the VSCode window,
  • Going to the “View” menu,
  • Clicking on the “Command Palette” option,
  • and running the “CodeRoad: Start” command
  1. Follow the instructions in CodeRoad to complete the course

also there is this topic linked for more infos

3

Hi Ilenia,
Since the last three weeks I was absent to learn ‘Build a Mario Database’ because I was sick. Last time it used codeAlly, but now it is using gitpod. That means I lose all my progress and have to start again from scratch? I haven’t completed ‘Build a Mario Database’ back then. It was already 80% progress, if I am not mistaken. Is there a way that I can continue my progress?

4

You can try from your CodeAlly dashboard, but if that doesn’t work you will need to start the project from the beginning if you want to complete it

1 Like
5

Hi Ilenia,

When i am clicking Start course I am unable to open the page or no Response.

6

I believe the solution is to run the “CodeRoad: Start” command from the command palette in gitpod. Once gitpod is open (after the loading project workspace screen) click the hamburger icon in the vs code left-most column (with the icons). The hamburger icon has the 3 lines, then go to View > Command Palette. Scroll down (or type “cod”) to the “CodeRoad: Start” option and select it.

You will have to do this everytime you start a new project/lesson or return to a lesson you started (like from the gitpod dashboard).

I hope this helps!

7

I feel there is missing the troubleshooting part. I tried out the postgres Course (building Mario Database) and it is , working, not working, working, not working, …

I know I should provide steps to reproduce this but I can not recognize any sort of pattern in this really.

So for now, my evaluation is … you do not get to learn postgres because you are busy with thinking about how you might be able to convince the platform to play along. Which in the end leads me to the thought … The idea of freecodecampo is amazing … practically it is not stable enough to provide real learning, so the genius concept behind it becomes unfortunately pretty pointless.

8

here is an example:

camper: /project$ psql --username=freecodecamp mario_database
Border style is 2.
Title is " ".
Pager usage is off.
psql (12.17 (Ubuntu 12.17-1.pgdg22.04+1))
SSL connection (protocol: TLSv1.3, cipher: TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384, bits: 256, compression: off)
Type "help" for help.

mario_database=> \d
mario_database=>                         List of relations
+--------+-----------------------------+----------+--------------+
| Schema |            Name             |   Type   |    Owner     |
+--------+-----------------------------+----------+--------------+
| public | characters                  | table    | freecodecamp |
| public | characters_character_id_seq | sequence | freecodecamp |
+--------+-----------------------------+----------+--------------+
(2 rows)


mario_database=> CREATE TABLE more_info ;
ERROR:  syntax error at or near ";"
LINE 1: CREATE TABLE more_info ;

mario_database=> CREATE TABLE more_info() ;
CREATE TABLE

so the CREATE TABLE only works whether you add a function-like () to the table_name. This is not required by postgres I think (said with 2 years postgres experience) but some sort of special requirement of the CodeRoad app.

9

the tests are written by humans, please open a ticket in the issue tracker so that it can be solved