I made my (non-programming) girlfriend try codecademy and she had the same kind of troubles. I had to go at lengths to explain to her what a console was.
She also told me that codecademy assumes too much stuff is known, like booleans or whatever. All the things that we take for granted and innate are extremely complicated to teach through a human-computer interaction.
In the end she went and googled "javascript tutorial", clicked one of the results and told me "this is much clearer". The tutorial was in classic textual form. I think codecademy looks very appealing for developers because it looks like it's easy to learn on it, but that's because we are developers, not laypeople.
Slightly offtopic: I also have a non-programming girlfriend and she recently expressed an interest in learning what programming is all about. This is because she often sees me coding, knows that I like it and that it's a big part of my life, and feels bad when I start talking about how I started some new project and she knows that I cannot tell her in detail what it's about because she wouldn't understand me (I ususally like to make stuff for developers, like libraries, tools and so on, not stuff for general public).
So I've been pondering what would be the best way to teach her a bit about programming, just to give her some general idea on what programming is. Should I just make a simple website with her and show her how to do basic stuff using javascript, or should I start with some theory first (I'm not thinking here about teaching her theoretical CS, just some basic OO principles). Anybody has any advice?
"Should I just make a simple website with her and show her how to do basic stuff using javascript"
I think the easiest way to learn is to take a simple page or script that already does something and change it. With that you get a little excitement that motivates you to learn further.
The classical computer learning books normally start with a "hello world" program and then move on from there.
I'd like to see someone build a learn-to-code site around Yahoo Pipes; where you'd learn about each module by making something cool and useful. Later, once you have a basic understanding of what can be done, you'd work backwards to do the same by coding. The problem I've had with most of the online tutorials is that at the end of the day I don't have anything I can actually use.
I can't imagine this would be productive. What's the point of learning OO stuff if you aren't actually going to be writing programs big enough to warrant it right away? Get started with the smallest part of of the joy of programming: write some code and see it do something, even "10 print hi goto 10" is going to be a lot more exciting than OO, I would think.
She also told me that codecademy assumes too much stuff is known, like booleans or whatever. All the things that we take for granted and innate are extremely complicated to teach through a human-computer interaction.
In the end she went and googled "javascript tutorial", clicked one of the results and told me "this is much clearer". The tutorial was in classic textual form. I think codecademy looks very appealing for developers because it looks like it's easy to learn on it, but that's because we are developers, not laypeople.