Codecademy adds jQuery lessons and scratchpad to its online coding school

Codecademy has added jQuery lessons and a scratchpad to its fun and engaging tool that teaches people how to code online, the company is announcing today.

The new jQuery lesson is the first to be contributed by a member of the Codecademy community, and the scratchpad tool will let people see what the code they’ve created in action.

Codecademy is a free site where people who are interested in learning programming can take lessons through an interface that makes the whole process like a game.

jQuery is a JavaScript library for creating interactive HTML-based websites more quickly.  It is one of the most popular JavaScript libraries, and is used by more than 49 percent of the top 10,000 websites on the Internet.

“It really takes people back to the exciting part of programming, which is building things, breaking things, and seeing how they work,” Codecademy co-founder Zach Sims told VentureBeat. Codecademy recently passed the 800,000-user mark, and Sims says that jQuery is just the beginning of what’s in store.

“It sort of goes back to the learning by doing that we’ve espoused from the beginning, says Sims, “We just figured we’d put an editor there so people can just free-form experiment, and actually implement the things they’re learning,” says Sims. The new features are part of a greater effort to make the site more of a destination, and to expand the ways in it is serving visitors.

Codecademy recently raised a $2.5 million Series A round from top angel investors, which it plans to use to grow its team over the coming months. To coincide with the announcement, Codecademy released a JavaScript lesson conceived by Union Square Ventures managing partner Albert Wenger.