> If you ask most people what stopped them from reading their entire programming book (and we’ve talked to hundreds of people), it’s almost always that they ar

> If you ask most people what stopped them from reading their entire programming book (and we’ve talked to hundreds of people), it’s almost always that they aren’t motivated enough. In school, learning is motivated by report cards and teacher expectations. We hope we can build a motivational experience that pushes anyone to program - not just the stereotypical developer. Badges and achievements are awesome when done right, but will only go so far with motivation. Real, intrinsic motivation will come from realizing that you can create something with the skills you've learned. If you could somehow capture this in Codecademy I think you could score a decisive advantage against the traditional tutorial/book learning model of learning to program. Context: I'm currently working on a spaced repetition app that schedules Japanese vocab/sentence flashcards for you. While it has achievements/badges for behaviour that's conducive to your Japanese learning, it also finds native content on the internet that you're likely going to be able to read 90% of (based on the vocab cards you've done well on). Realizing that you can actually read Japanese content for native Japanese (i.e. you can actually _use_ the skill you're learning here) is the biggest rush of motivation I've experienced. It pushes you to go on and see how much more you could do, way more than any badge or achievement could.