Frobocode
2022
Summary
Frobocode is a an interactive text adventure course to help people learn to code in a fun way.
My founder, Fabian Dietrich and I, built this concept and landing page over the course of about 2 months next to our jobs.
Description we used for our YC application:
A website for self-guided online learning that combines programming exercises with illustrated stories.
Our platform has text-based courses, similar to Codecademy, with exercises that can be solved in a web browser. What makes us different is that we use storytelling to make the lessons more fun and engaging. Between the exercises are texts that introduce characters, areas, and choices that influence the story. Each lesson is illustrated with a computer-generated artwork. The courses are created by us to keep the quality high and retain 100% ownership of our content.
The platform includes gamification mechanisms like achievements, skill badges, and artifacts that players can display on their profile. Each course belongs to a literary genre, e.g. thriller, romance, sci-fi, vampire, etc. We are also considering experimenting with adult content.
Our pilot course is located in a dark fantasy universe, teaching HTML and CSS for beginners through interactive quests. Users fulfill story challenges to proceed to the next objective, e.g. arranging images of ducks in a row to practice CSS flexbox.