Lesson Standards

Description and Purpose

A lesson is Codecademy's primary tool for introducing new material. It provides introduction to new material through the narratives and guided practice through the checkpoints. The entire scope of a lesson is associated with a set of Learning Objectives and Outcomes as defined during the syllabus design process.

Content Location

A lesson is a type of content item. It must be placed within a module to be surfaced to learners. It is composed of a series of ordered exercises.

A diagram of a lesson containing exercises within a module.

Overarching Standards

All content is written in Markdown and adheres to Codecademy’s Markdown Style Guide.
All content adheres to Codecademy's Editorial and Pedagogy standards
Content adheres to Codecademy’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Accessibility standards.
All work is original. Sources are cited via links or, for datasets, by following the Dataset Guidelines.

Fields in Author

Content

Description

A brief description of what the learner will learn by taking this lesson.

The description is surfaced to learners in Syllabus and Overview pages for courses but not Paths.

Lesson Exercises

The list of exercises that make up the lesson.

The target of 6 exercises per lesson is recommended, but up to 10 exercises is within reason. The majority of Lessons (~57%) are 6-10 exercises in length (as of January 2022).
To create a new exercise to be added to the lesson, click on the "Add +" button. You will be prompted to choose a title for the exercise and a slug will be auto-generated.
Exercises may be rearranged after they have been created.
The lesson should start with an introduction and end with a review.
Exercises should be scaffolded so as to slowly increase in complexity of the content over the course of the lesson.

Attributes

Title

The title of the lesson, displayed to learners in the course menu and on the course landing page.

Titles should include key terms when appropriate (for SEO purposes.)
The Lesson title should describe what is in the lesson as well as be SEO optimized. For example, instead of "Minimax", go with "Decision making with AI: Minimax"

Slug

The slug is used to create a URI for the content item.

The slug is auto-generated based on the Title field though it can be edited.

Credited Authors

This field allows you to add an associated author(s) to the item.

For now, this field is not publicly visible, but is helpful as a reference.

Minutes to Complete

This field should be how long you think the lesson will take to complete.

Though this may vary, you can estimate that each exercise will take between 3-5 minutes to complete.
When in doubt, air on the side of being conservative — so make a longer estimate rather than a shorter one.

Linked Content

Learning Standard List

This field lists the learning standards associated with a given content item.

Each lesson should be aligned with at least one learning standard. Note that the learning standards are not visible to the learner.
Learners should receive Introduction to New Material and checks for understanding on each associated learning standard.

This field lists the categories associated with a given content item.

Categories are used to tag lessons that serve as Code Challenges.
Other kinds of lessons should not use this field.

Containers That Use This Lesson

This field is auto-generated and will populate any containers that contain this lesson.

Examples

Here are several examples of excellent lessons. - Learn Python - String Methods - Learn Swift - Variables