Teach Programming in the IDE: Create Courses with the JetBrains Academy Plugin
Build interactive programming courses that learners take inside PyCharm or IntelliJ IDEA, with tasks checked by tests and feedback that helps them learn.
Intermediate · Software Development · about 12 hours · 4 modules · certificate on completion
Taught by Dontè Jacksoneè, Lasse Mäkìnen, AI Learning Companions.
About this course
Build programming courses that learners take inside a professional IDE. With the free JetBrains Academy plugin for PyCharm, IntelliJ IDEA and other JetBrains IDEs, every task in a course has a description, starter code and a Check button that runs your tests on the learner's code, so learners practise with real tools and get feedback straight away. You'll start by taking a course as a learner, then build your own: organising lessons and tasks, writing theory tasks and quizzes, and creating programming tasks with answer placeholders and tests whose messages tell learners exactly what to fix. You'll check your tests against the mistakes learners really make, try your course in a preview, pilot it with a real learner, and share it as an archive or on JetBrains Marketplace, learning along the way what makes exercises and feedback teach. The plugin's menus change between versions, so the course shows where things usually are and how to find any action by name. It ends with a mini-course of your own, built, tested and piloted.
What you'll learn
- Explain why practising in a real IDE helps people learn to program
- Install the JetBrains Academy plugin and take a course as a learner
- Organise a course into lessons of theory tasks, programming tasks checked by tests, and quizzes
- Write task descriptions, starter code and tests whose messages help learners fix their mistakes
- Try a course as a learner, pilot it, improve it and share it
- Design exercises that build skills step by step, with feedback that teaches
Skills you'll gain
Course design, JetBrains Academy plugin, Programming exercises, Feedback design, Python unittest, Markdown, Piloting courses
Tools
PyCharm, IntelliJ IDEA, JetBrains Academy plugin
Before you start
Comfort writing small Python programs and functions: the course's examples are in Python, and the same ideas work for Java and Kotlin in IntelliJ IDEA. You need PyCharm or IntelliJ IDEA (a free version is enough) with Python 3, and the free JetBrains Academy plugin, which the course shows you how to install.
Modules
Why teach programming in the IDE
See why practising in a professional IDE helps people learn to program, install the JetBrains Academy plugin, and take a course the way your learners will.
- Learning to program in a real IDE (10 min)
- Taking a course as a learner (12 min)
- Hands-on lab: Take a course as a learner, then plan yours
Build a course: lessons, tasks and quizzes
Learn how a course is organised, create one in the IDE with lessons and tasks of each kind, and write theory tasks and quiz questions that teach.
- How a course is organised (10 min)
- Create a course in the IDE (13 min)
- Theory tasks and quizzes (11 min)
- Hands-on lab: Build the skeleton of your course
Programming tasks and the tests that check them
Write task descriptions learners can follow, starter code with answer placeholders, and tests that check the work and say what's wrong when it isn't right.
- Task descriptions learners can follow (11 min)
- Starter code and answer placeholders (11 min)
- Tests that check the work and teach (13 min)
- Hands-on lab: Write a checked task with feedback that helps
Try it, share it and make it better
Try your course as a learner, pilot it with a real learner, share it as an archive or on JetBrains Marketplace, and design exercises and feedback that teach.
- Try your course as a learner (11 min)
- Share your course (10 min)
- Designing exercises and feedback that teach (13 min)
- Hands-on lab: Pilot your course and ship it
Project: Create a mini-course for your learners
Design, build, pilot and share a short course in the JetBrains Academy plugin for learners you know or can picture clearly, such as a class, a team or a club. Choose a language the plugin supports and a topic learners can complete in about an hour. The course needs at least two lessons and six tasks, including at least one theory task, three programming tasks checked by tests, and one quiz. Every programming task needs a description with examples and edge cases, starter code with answer placeholders, and tests whose messages tell learners what to fix. For each programming task, write at least two typical wrong answers and show that your tests catch them, as the leap-years checker did. Try the course in a preview, pilot it with at least one learner, improve it, and export it as a course archive.
PyCharm, IntelliJ IDEA and JetBrains Academy plugin are trademarks of JetBrains s.r.o. This course is independent: JetBrains hasn't made or endorsed it.