Blackbird's recent marketing campaign began some time in April and if you're teaching computer science you've probably heard of it by now. The sales pitch is that it is "the world's first educational version of JavaScript." As this article describes it, Blackbird "enables middle school students and teachers to learn real-world coding skills in a supportive, educational environment." Maybe, but it's hard to see this as a world's first anything. This genre has been around for ages and similar supportive environments for Javascript (among many other languages) are widely used by students. Like Codecademy, it consists of "lessons are arranged in progressive units." Maybe we could say it's the world's first Codecademy for Javascript, except again, it isn't. probably the most accurate bit of marketing is, as Richard Byrne observes, that it is "used by teachers who don't have any prior coding experience."
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