March 19, 2024

Mozilla’s Thimble IDE gets Resurrected as a Frontend Dev Teaching Tool

Some developers may remember Mozilla’s old Thimble development webapp. It was an online coding platform where you could write code and build simple interfaces without the need to save any files locally to your computer.

Over the years many better online IDE’s have been created such as CodePen. Thimble simple hasn’t been able to keep up, and has since fallen by the wayside.

But now Mozilla has re-launched Thimble as an online IDE made for teaching people how to read & write code.

mozilla thimble 2015 redesign

If you have time be sure to check out the new Mozilla Thimble landing page. It’s a fully-featured eduational coding webapp meant to teach curious designers, unskilled developers, or just average Internet users how to write code.

The IDE is runs solely on the frontend so you can update HTML/CSS/JS code and see the changes in real-time. It seems Mozilla’s goal is to share this product as completely open source for educators and individuals to share the knowledge. Taken from the article:

Thimble exemplifies the hands-on, collaborative learning philosophy at the core of Mozilla’s work. Thimble can be used by educators to create a customized and interactive classroom experience, or used by independent learners eager to teach themselves via step-by-step tutorials. All of Thimble’s creations are open source and fully remixable. And Thimble itself is free and open source, always.

In this newer version you’ll find a bunch of helpful features including multi-page projects & websites linked together in one Thimble.

Also the experience can be guided by a wizard that’ll teach the basics and offer helpful code hints along the way. Thimble is now perfect for anyone who just wants to understand how to write code and build websites.

If you want to learn more check out the new Thimble website or preview the following ~2 minute video:

Jake is a creative writer and UI designer by trade. You can follow him on twitter @jakerocheleau or learn more at his personal website JakeRocheleau.com.

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