You bring up an interesting point about whether outcome-based education is effective in learning programming. On the one hand, as apsurd points out, programmin

You bring up an interesting point about whether outcome-based education is effective in learning programming. On the one hand, as apsurd points out, programming is probably not something that can be done without understanding what you're doing. It's one thing to program HTML, CSS, simple Javascript where you're getting instant visual feedback [1], another to write C, Python, Java, etc. where the feedback is not so instant or visual and requires you to keep a constantly updating mental model of what's going on. On the other hand, learning something new involves doing it enough that your neural pathways rewire to become more proficient at it. As you pass the stages of constantly thinking about what you're doing to how and why, leaps or breakthroughs in understanding become more likely and frequent - jumping from plateau to plateau so to speak. Question is, what's the best way, and can it be abstracted to web-based tutorials? I don't know what current state of the art Cogsci research says about this, though it's on the todo list [2]. 1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3948737 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3948737 2. http://www.reddit.com/r/cogsci/search?q=education&restrict_sr=on http://www.reddit.com/r/cogsci/search?q=education&restri...