Fun fact that is not remotely a coincidence: The founder and CEO of CodeCombat is a friend and Beeminder superfan and previous guest blogger here on the Beeminder blog! In fact, Nick Winter is the first person to create more than one of the apps/services/devices in our autodata integrations gallery — the other being Skritter. See also the announcement in the CodeCombat community and on CodeCombat’s GitHub page.
You’re probably here because you either know and love Beeminder, or you’re a fan of CodeCombat. In case it’s the latter, we’ll start with a quick explanation of what Beeminder’s all about. For the full Beeminder story, you could dive in to our best-of blog posts or check out our amazing Beeminder community forum.
What’s special about Beeminder is that we combine Quantified Self — i.e., self-tracking data collection and visualization — with commitment contracts. If you don’t know anything about commitment contracts, it works like this with Beeminder: We plot your progress on a graph and represent your commitment as a literal bright red line. If you cross that line, we charge you money. Long-time Beeminder users find that those stings (get it?) are well worth it for all the awesomeness we induce the rest of the time. But if the thought of having to pay money is too scary, that’s perfect: you’ll be very motivated to keep all your datapoints above the red line.
CodeCombat
CodeCombat looks like this:
You write code to get your character through levels and collect gems and armor and magical items and XP. It’s fun and edifying and brilliantly done. It’s targeted at kids but don’t let that turn you off. The levels eventually get extremely advanced and we absolutely recommend CodeCombat to anyone who wants to learn to code.
Our son, Cantor (age 12), has been beta-testing the CodeCombat/Beeminder integration for a while (and been using CodeCombat for years before that) and has racked up over a 100,000 XP:
Getting Started
Here’s how to get one of those of your very own.
Sign up for both Beeminder and CodeCombat, of course. Note your CodeCombat username. Then create a new goal on Beeminder and click the CodeCombat logo. You’ll see a little overview page of how the integration works and then a screen like this:
Fill that in and you’re off to the races. You’ll never have to do anything on Beeminder. Just go earn more CodeCombat XP when Beeminder yells at you!
PS: Not sure if this matters to disclose in this context — we already mentioned that Nick Winter is our friend — but just in case, we’re also investors in CodeCombat. It’s the bees’ knees, in our highly biased but correct opinion.