Last weekend I played through the course “Adventures in Web Animations” on Codeschool.com. This was my first Codeschool.com course and I mostly took it, because it was the free weekend, I had nothing else to do, being sick and at home, and because web animation was a topic, that I knew not very well.

The lessons have been rather simple, with easy multiple choice questions and very guided coding excercises, but the instructor managed to explain the different parts of animation in great detail. While one cannot expect to learn this topic to the bone in one very short course, I have the impression that I now have a good overview how to animate with css and where to look for helpful resources on the way.

What I really liked was that this course has an accompanying screencast called “Soup to Bits: Adventures in Web Animations”. Usually I am not that much of a fan of screencasts for learning, but this one hit the right spot: I shows the instructor of the course Alyssa Nicoll together with another Codeschool.com developer Dan Denney working on an example website that is somewhat complete, but as they conclude, missing animations. So you can follow them for around an hour, how they put together the animations an this website, how they make mistakes and debug them, how they come to decide on the specifics of the animations and so on, until the website is ready. And if you really want to try your new skills, you can do the same, because the website they work on is available as a github repository.

These two parts, the course and the screencast, really work well together. The course sets the ground on which it is possible to go through the screencast without explaining everything and the screencast gives some meat the the bones of still dry and untested knowledge from the course.