Interactive next generation video format for learning code
Humans are visual beasts, so it’s no wonder that videos are heavily used in online programming education.
However, creating coding screencasts is a hassle. You’ll have to download a tool, setup your system, record, re-record, edit, swear some, encode, upload, and finally wait for YouTube to re-encode. And then you often have poor representation of what you wanted to say.
What would have taken you five minutes to explain in person, takes you an hour to be able to explain online.
When you try to teach programming or want someone to use your API correctly, being able to communicate well is essential for learning, onboarding, and minimizing support or questions.
What if it was possible to remove all this friction, and also give the end user a more interactive experience than video? To be able to interact with the content and it not just being dead pixels.
Enter Scrimba!
When you create a Scrimba screencast, you just start the recording while programming or using the code and — voila — you have a video. Or, it’s not actually a traditional video, it just looks like a video. You can pause and copy the text, and more impressive is that you can change the code, run it, and then see how your changes affects the output. Check it out:
We got introduced to the founders, Per and Sindre, we were quickly impressed by their focus on solving a big problem in training and code communication.
Our thesis is that video should not be a “dead format,” and especially when the video is of text and code. In the future, more and more code needs to be conveyed and used easier. Scrimba will enable corporates to have their internal libraries and external APIs to be used correctly. Individual teachers might be able to sell courses on Scrimba or just help more people learn how to code.
And we love that Scrimba has a bigger vision: to make online code learning even better than in-person learning.
After the investment, it was great to see the community love for Scrimba on Hacker News.
Welcome to the family, Scrimba! And Nordic Makers’ first Norwegian investment!