General Assembly Launches Dash, A Tool For Coding Newbies

As General Assembly moves away from co-working and focuses more heavily on educating entrepreneurs and startups, the company is releasing a brand new tool to the public. It’s called Dash, and it’s an interactive online program that helps teach people how to code through a series of interactive storyline-based tutorials.

The program was originally created in-house by project manager Nathan Bradshaw and a GA and co-founder Brad Hargreaves, who wanted to give General Assembly students young and old the opportunity to get comfortable with coding.

Dash works in the browser, and helps users learn CSS, Javascript and HTML through various tasks that are similar to the real life of a coder or developer. For example, as you go through various lessons you’ll learn how to first build a personal website, then a blog theme, then a small business website, and eventually a CSS Robot.

“Codeacademy and other code-learning websites are great, but they kind of lose context,” said Jake Schwartz, co-founder at General Assembly. “We wanted to give people real-world scenarios to learn from.”

That said, each Dash project is framed as a task from a fictional client, with corrections along the way in case you make a mistake. But it goes beyond that. Once you’ve completed a project for your client, users can then customize the website and focus on design. After each site is beautified, Dash helps you publish it to the web.

By the end of the course, users will have three mini-sites up and running under their name.

Dash was originally created as an internal tool for General Assembly back in February, assigned as “pre-work” for students taking General Assembly’s full-time Front End Web Development immersive program.

However, after realizing it’s so well-liked among the GA community, the company decided to offer it as a publicly available tool.

If you want to check out Dash, head over here and sign up.