Treehouse launched last November with an admirable (or terrifying) goal: To teach the world how to design and develop for the Web, iOS and now Android. Essentially the lovechild of Lynda.com and Codeacademy, Treehouse is building an educational platform that employs video, quizzes and a little gamification to help aspiring programmers and app developers learn the trade — whether or not they have any prior experience.
To date, over 12K people (from ages 7 to 50) are paying for access to the startup’s platform, and Treehouse has been quick to generate revenue as a result. So, now the Portland-based company is looking to give back to its community of learners — and help inspire the next generation of web and mobile developers — announcing today that it’s giving $3 million-worth of free tech education to 2,500 college students.
What does that mean? Treehouse wants to be an affordable destination to learn how to build websites and mobile apps — from the very noobiest of noobs to veterans looking to brush up. Like Lynda.com, it offers expert-created-and-curated videos and content on a variety of topics, like HTML, CSS Foundations, Introduction to Programming, to name a few. Yet, unlike Lynda, Treehouse is project-based. Users learn to code by building a simplified version of Facebook, for example, and by practicing what they learn in realtime in their browser.
