Hello there,
I have been learning in freeCodeCamp for over 2-3 months. I love this platform. But I think about something that should be improved in freeCodeCamp.
In freeCodeCamp, all the instructions of the courses might be difficult to understand for beginners, and almost every time, beginners might need to read the relevant documentation. Sometimes you might get confused about what you are reading. I will be more than happy if the instructions are made easy and self-explanatory.
Thanks,
Arpon
Can you provide examples of instructions you find confusing and how you would improve them?
Hello, and thanks for your instant response.
I would like to point out some of them, because for the other ones I have to dive deep into the curriculum.
In CSS Flexbox part of Responsive Web Design course, many properties and values are somehow a bit confusing. What does each value do is not explained well enough.
In Typography in Responsive Web Design course, the instruction says to use text-indent property at some point. But its explanation was not there. First I thought that it was taught before. So I digged through my notes and my previous courses to see where it was taught, but I found nowhere. At last, I learned by reading documentation.
In the Survey Form certification project, the instructions are a little bit confusing and hard to understand. Also I did not go much further because I am still in halfway of Responsive Web Design.
Thanks.
Can you be more specific about what you would change in specific steps?
I will be more than happy if the instructions are made easy and self-explanatory.
The site has come a long way since it launched but this has always been an issue with the modules. I think learning to code is just hard in general because you need to change the way you think, but unclear instructions definitely doesnt help.
In my time learning I’ve realized that having a community to give live feedback is huge. Discord is nice but ChatGPT was a game changer for me because I get instant feedback from an Ai peer programmer. As long as youre using it to explore what you dont understand rather than just have it give you the final answer. You can even use it to help you to just clarify a confusing question.
My hot take is the typical grinding for hours of trial and error with no help is less useful than deep exploration of concepts then applying them to your problem. Beginners need someone to show them how to think about problems like a programmer, rather than just memorizing syntax.
In a java bootcamp I attended last year, it took me just 6 hours teaching someone how to code in javascript from scratch all the way up to classes after spending the first 4 weeks in complete confusion.
AI guesses words to put together and may be completely wrong. Double check everything GPT and similar tell you.
To put it another way, AI isn’t a “peer programmer”, its a statistical word combiner.
I think you got lucky there. Some people I’ve met take a lot longer than that just to understand that computers are not mind-reading magicians.
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Its a peer programmer in the sense that you can discussions with it to reason through problems and help you point out bugs in your existing code. To say its a statistical word combiner, while technically true, is overly simplistic.
Humans can also be wrong, and you still need to check your answers. I agree that you shouldn’t trust everything it says. I sometimes use multiple LLMs to cross reference answers. I mainly use it as an advanced search engine. In general, the quality of answers depends on the quality of your prompts.
I say ChatGPT because thats what everyone knows, just like I’ll say google instead of duckduckgo to refer to search engines in general. I personally like perplexity.ai because it shows you the sources that it gets its response from.
When I need higher quality I’ll use Claude which i use sparingly because the free version only gives you about 12-15 queries every 8 hours
The fact that it remembers context from previous answers is huge because you can have fluid and intelligent conversions with it. This lets me explore ideas and test errors in my own thinking. Not just in coding but all kinds of other domains. I sometimes like talking to it claude about philosophy, science, etc in a way thats deeper than just meer information lookup.
yeh thats often one of the first things I emphasize when explaining things to someone. People aren’t generally aware about the sheer number of unconscious assumptions their mind naturally makes in everyday tasks.
The deeper down the rabbit hold you go you realize even javascript is making assumptions about things like datatypes and memory allocation compared to lower level languages like C.
But yeh. A bootcamp is a special case because everyone is there to learn full time. Plus the guy already had 4 weeks of prior grinding even though he was confused. He needed someone to help him put it all together
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AI just isn’t a peer in any sense. You are better off talking to real humans. AI is cool, but it is a dangerous tool when you don’t know enough to know when it’s lying to you. It will happily fabricate information and sources.
AI just isn’t a peer in any sense.
hard disagree. in the peer programming sense its a good navigator that helps you to review your code. Even humans are limited in their knowledge and you cant always find a knowledgeable human thats willing to spend time with you for as long as you need them. It might not be able to replace a human but the productivity boost especially for research, reasoning, summarizing, debugging, etc are undeniable
It is a dangerous tool when you don’t know enough to know when it’s lying to you
Thats just true in for the internet in general. “Misinformation” was an issue long before LLMs. It all comes down to personal accountability.
which is why you use one that gives you sources. perplexity doesnt fabricate sources. if gives you the direct link. if accuracy is that important you use it as a starting place rather than a final solution. The thing to remember is Ai can only ever give 2nd hand information.
We’re not going to agree here. I’ll continue to rely upon human experts over statistical guessing.
the article seems to be more critical of the companies data collection practices rather than the model itself
I’m not trying to convince anyone to use it. everyone has their own workflow
Every LLMs scrapes data in order to train their models. and Perplexity isnt representative of all LLMs. Its a smaller company and their model isnt even top 10 but i like it because its free. dispite the risk of hallucinations i still find it useful. and the pro version lets you use claude sonnet 3.5 instead of the default model.
claude sonnet 3.5 is able to perform reasoning at a graduate level that matchs and outperform humans in a range of areas. GPT 4 was able to score a 94% on the bar exam for lawyers.
AI passing the Bar is more of an inditement of the Bar than a statement about how good AI is. Use with caution. It’s cool and useful but you need to double check everything it says.
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you need to double check everything it says
agreed. i think as long as you understand the limitations its super useful
As long as you don’t act like it’s a real person
yeh anthropomorphizing Ai is a rookie mistake. its just a productivity tool at the end of the day
You should always be doing this. If there’s something you forget or don’t know, read the docs. You can try a variety of sites they will all have different explanations and maybe one will work better for you.
Looking up other resources or documentation should be a 1st step, not a last resort.
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Hello,
I just wanted to say that the instructions of freeCodeCamp should be a little bit well-explained. freeCodeCamp, as an open source platform, is one of the best learning platform, according to my opinion. But the texts are a little bit overwhelming. I read and watched reviews of freeCodeCamp, and almost every review pointed out the difficulty of comprehending the instructions.
I always read MDN Web Docs because it is something far more superior than anything else in case of the information it have. The documentation is also up-to-date and VS Code uses it as references.
I think that freeCodeCamp, as a learning platform, should have beginner-friendly instructions. But other than that, I cannot find any other cons of freeCodeCamp.
this is not actionable feedback
when you find instructions that are not beginner friendly and need to be changed, please open an issue on github so that it can be changed, thank you