JetBrains Academy: Looking Back at 2022
Welcome to JetBrains Academy highlights, where we will remember all the amazing things that happened last year. In 2022, JetBrains Academy added lots of knowledge areas and developed ways to explore them. We released numerous new tracks and projects, offered new subjects of study, introduced a new programming language, improved our platform for organizations, and more.
Whether you’re an experienced developer looking for some challenging tasks or a beginner just starting, there’s something for everyone in this blog. We hope you’ll enjoy remembering these happy moments with us.
We’d like to share some milestones from the previous year:
🎓 Newcomers to our learning community
🆕 New tracks, fields, and languages to study
❤️ Favorite projects of the year
📚 Administrative functionality for team learning
🚀 Hour of Code
Newcomers to our learning community
Let’s welcome our newcomers who joined JetBrains Academy in 2022. We have counted 195,525 new learners, and now there are more than 650,000 of you in total!
New tracks, subjects, and languages to study
In 2022 we released 13 new tracks, including the track that provides an opportunity to learn a new programming language – Scala, a dynamic and strongly statically typed language. This track will give you all the knowledge you need about the Scala language. You’ll learn its syntax, master the built-in tools, and as a result, will be able to write simple programs combining different programming paradigms.
Another significant 2022 event in JetBrains Academy was the release of SQL tracks. We released 3 tracks that introduce you to the basics of the SQL query language, teach you how to work with databases and build a connection between an application and its stored data, and give you a chance to practice with MySQL — the world’s most popular open-source database.
Sounds thrilling, doesn’t it?
Favorite projects of the year
2022 was quite eventful and productive for JetBrains Academy. The numbers speak for themselves. We created 88 new projects and published 482 new educational topics! We also received an overwhelming number of your comments and feedback – 333,921 comments (wow!) – and would like to express our gratitude to you, as we could not have done it all without your support and enthusiasm!
That’s not all!
We suggest you look at the list of the most popular 2022 projects released by JetBrains Academy. So let’s dive in and see what you loved most.
Java projects
💚 Zookeper. Easy.
In this project, you will create a tool for helping the local zoo look after its denizens. Alongside, you will learn the basics of Java syntax and find out how to work with variables, data storage types, such as lists, and while loops.
💛 ASCII Mirror. Medium.
Far, far away, in the lands of ASCII, there live ASCII animals who need your help. Something is not right with their mirrors — they appear crooked. In this project, you’ll find the root cause of the problem and solve it while learning the basics of Java, such as input and output, as well as operations with strings, files, and object lists.
Python projects
💛 Loan Calculator. Medium
Whether you are just saving up for something or considering taking a loan, sooner or later, everyone has to face personal finance management. With this project, you will be able to make informed decisions based on different financial parameters. You will practice using math and Python in everyday tasks, work with third-party libraries and modules, learn to use a command line interface (CLI), and get familiar with a variety of financial instruments.
❤️ Salary Prediction (Data Science). Challenging.
Linear regression is one of the simplest yet most powerful tools for finding regularities in data and using them for prediction. In this project, you will practice fitting linear models with the scikit-learn library to predict the salary of NBA players. You will also learn how to apply polynomial feature engineering, test your data for multicollinearity, and evaluate models with the MAPE score.
Kotlin projects
💛 Encryption-Decryption. Medium.
Familiarize yourself with Kotlin while building a simple cipher application that creates a file and encrypts it and that can also be used to decrypt a previously encrypted file. In this project, you’ll pay special attention to working with files and the command line.
❤️ Tasklist. Challenging.
It’s always good to have a reminder of important tasks. It may be simple paper notes or a sophisticated app. In this project, you will create a text-based program that shows tasks, deadlines, and priorities.
JavaScript projects
💚 Carnival Gift Shop. Easy.
Welcome to the carnival gift shop! Now it’s time to spend all of the tickets you’ve won at the carnival. In this project, you will write a program to display the list of gifts available and the number of tickets you’ve won and also to help you buy the gift you want. You’ll get familiar with JavaScript’s syntax and practice variables, conditions, loops, and functions.
❤️ Hangman. Hard.
Hangman is a popular, even if grim, puzzle game. A cruel computer hides a word from you, which you need to guess letter by letter. If you fail, you’ll be “hanged”. If you win, you’ll survive. This project is a great choice if you’re just starting with JavaScript. You’ll go through all the basics, become familiar with different data types, develop an understanding of the building blocks of a program, and practice working with loops and arrays.
Go projects
💚 Simple Chatty Bot and Coffee Machine. Easy.
As beginner projects, they get selected and completed a lot, so if you’re looking for a suitable first project to kick-start your Go learning journey, these projects are the proven best choice. With them, you will learn basic Go syntax and practice working with variables, conditions, loops, and functions.
❤️ University Admission Procedure. Challenging.
It takes a lot of hard work to get into the university of your dreams. Indeed, the process is so stressful that it can be easy to overlook how much work the admissions process means for universities, particularly given the sheer volume of documents they need to process. In this project, you’ll put yourselves in the shoes of admissions officers tasked with implementing an algorithm to determine which students will be accepted. At each stage, the algorithm will become more complex and comprehensive.
Administrative functionality for team learning
In 2022, we focused on improving the platform’s administrative functionality. Now you can manage your team and see how effectively your team members are learning – all in one place. In particular, now you are able to add new members to your team and remove existing ones, connect your corporate domain with a single sign-on, see your team’s progress in the overview dashboards.
Read on more details in the blog.
Hour of Code
We can’t help mentioning our annual tradition to support the Hour of Code movement. For a whole week in December, we shared a series of blog posts highlighting the most popular projects for you to try and challenged you to solve coding problems every day.
Last year, more than 500 learners completed the challenge and received their well-deserved 25% discounts on a JetBrains Academy subscription. If you missed the opportunity to take part in our annual challenge, make sure to subscribe to our Twitter and Facebook accounts and stay on top of the next one!
Enjoy learning!
The JetBrains Academy Team
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