Member-only story

How Codecademy uses gamification to teach 50 million users

Engage, challenge, reward

Mary Borysova
UX Collective
7 min readJan 29, 2025

Codeacademy Logo

Learning to code isn’t just about typing lines of text — it’s about staying motivated, feeling accomplished, and actually enjoying the journey. Codecademy has cracked this code (pun intended!) by turning learning into a game.

How can we make users stay engaged with complex material in the product?

In this article, we will dive into the gamification design of Codeacademy, a top platform for learning computer science.

Let’s see how Codecademy makes coding less overwhelming with smart design. Let’s dive in!

Task organization

Unlike competitors like Udemy and Coursera, Codecademy offers an interactive learning experience where you write code directly in the browser and receive immediate feedback.

Aside from that, Codecademy incorporated various gamified features to sustain user motivation.

Codecademy breaks down the course into chapters, sub-chapters, lessons, and tasks within these lessons. This makes learning complex topics more manageable and helps you concentrate on what matters right now.

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Published in UX Collective

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Codecademy turns learning code into a fun experience with bite-sized tasks, instant feedback, and progress tracking. This gamified approach keeps users motivated and makes complex topics feel manageable.