Quest Map Update - Learning opportunities

By practicing on CodinGame, players learn new languages, algorithms and become better programmers.

We want to highlight this part of CG that is often hidden behind the competitive aspect of many activities here.

Here are all the updates that are in the pipe:

  • [Released] Each path on the quest map now unlocks a certification with 4 different levels: bronze, silver, gold, legend.
  • Highlight of your preferred languages and your level for each on the home page.
  • Rework of tags to tie them to learning opportunities and better track your progress on CodinGame
  • Rework of the profile page to show certifications, preferred languages and tags

As always, we value your feedback so don’t hesitate to let us know what you think of the updates!

PS: keep in mind that these updates mainly target new players who don’t see the value of CodinGame and leave the site after a few days.

7 Likes

I think it would be better to encourage people to build something that they can then showcase. Any kind of projects that are well presented usually benefit the one who made them. This would mean a multi or a puzzle, a tech.io article or even a solution to a problem that is well presented and explained in detail.

The certificates the way they are presented at the moment look a bit too much like unlocked achievements on some steam games. They need a better graphical presentation to help one showcase the skills more aesthetically appealing to whatever HR staff (with mandatory non-IT background whatsoever) they are sending it to.

Currently the collaboration badge can reward for building some puzzle or clash very quickly without much thought and then have it approved. There isn’t much collaboration involved there, you don’t need to be part of a team as the tooltip claims.

The community contests were actually something that did require a team and collaboration. When I look at the multi creation process I see it lacks means to even credit team members and mention what exactly they did (art ? code ? deployment ? testing ? statement ? … etc).

I also think useful community tools should be rewarded with a certificate. That’s something worth showcasing when you apply for a job.

Indepth tutorials like this one would also be much better to showcase: http://files.magusgeek.com/csb/csb_en.html (preferably post mortems imo)

EDIT: I forgot the streamers. You put a lot of value on your streamers, but there’s nothing to reward them for some successful or half-decent streaming.

PS: keep in mind that these updates mainly target new players who don’t see the value of CodinGame and leave the site after a few days.

Sure but often in chat you see newcommers ask: “will this help me get a job? is contributing to github repos better?”
Or even questions about how they can learn to create any bots / AI on this website or how they can learn machine-learning. Kaggle has good functionality in that direction, where you share a project as a tutorial or show how you solved the problem, a lot more to learn from it and overall works much better as something you can showcase when applying anywhere.

I think people want to learn or to work towards getting a job or to build bots for themselves.
Certificates and achievements aren’t bad if you just want to be on the site for fun and unlock some random fun stuff, however in that regard actual gaming is more appealing at the moment. Bot programming, writing basic scripts or even simple macros are more appealing overall, which makes botting outside CG on games where you’re not supposed to use bots, more appealing unfortunately.

6 Likes

I’ve always thought that the CG achievements(along with the level and the rank) are very worth to be included in your CV and presented at a job interview, having a dedicated, shareable section sounds nice and will ease the process.

I agree with @AntiSquid that the self created things like puzzle contributions and tutorials are really worth mentioning by the candidate. I’ve conducted some interviews and the candidates with their own projects are standing out (often they have difficulties explaining and presenting their work, but that’s another story).

My view for something like that is a link to a fancy personal, auto-generated page(something with the style of https://www.codingame.com/work/) with information for the player and his/her path in CodinGame.

6 Likes

Imagine you are a CG member (in fact you actually are), and you are going to apply for an IT job whose executives do not know much about CG. You want to click a button in CG to print your CG profile to become a pdf file to submit in application.

Imagine again you are the executive of that employing company. What kinds of information in the pdf profile would you regard as relevant to accept the application?

Put these information in (in a formal, official style an average employer would like to see).

What information would the employer regards as silly or irrelevant? Remove these junks.

You as the employer would also like to click on a link in the pdf to see the more detailed online profile, and to explore what is CG.

The candidate would also like some prepared words to explain to employers what is CG and why the CG profile is relevant to his application.

These features could mean very high user-retention.

8 Likes

I would like something similar to the LinkedIn badge to put on my webpage, just for CodinGame.
Example: https://socialsaleslink.com/using-the-linkedin-badge-on-your-website/
The badge service could have queryable properties like:
https://codingame.com/badge/$USERID?contests=wondev-woman&contests=kutulu&includemulties=5&includerank=true&includecontributions=true&includecertificates=true etc…
Or maybe some setup in your profile to cache up this information to not spam the server too much. (though this URI might be a good starting point)
Simply adding an export to PNG would be enough to add it to a CV.

Also, what about smaller link buttons usually found in Blogs, pointing to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook etc. Do we have the SVG path of the CG logo to redirect to our profile? (or can we use the CG logo images freely for that purpose?)

3 Likes

As you’ve probably seen, we’ve released a few things in the plan I shared earlier:

  • [Released] Each path on the quest map now unlocks a certification with 4 different levels: bronze, silver, gold, legend.
  • [Released] Highlight of your preferred languages and your level for each on the home page.
  • [Released] Rework of tags to tie them to learning opportunities and better track your progress on CodinGame
  • [Next week] Rework of the profile page to show certifications, preferred languages and tags

Thank you for the suggestions regarding shareable badge/pdf and also adding highlighting relevant contributions. I’ll discuss with my colleagues for the how and when, possibly as a V2 of this rework.

1 Like
  • [Next week] Rework of the profile page to show certifications, preferred languages and tags

it’s actually released earlier than expected! :tada:

Refresh your profile page and let us know what you think!

Discover the changes on your home page too.

PS: tags/skills must be checked in the puzzles you already solved for them to appear on your home and profile pages. It’s not retroactive.

11 Likes

View more looks much better. I would like to see it as a default setup of a profile page.

what do you mean by that?

I think I mislead codingame.com/home with codingame.com/profile. The letter looks really good. It is accessible by View more as well as by “My profile” and this is a bit confusing.

Nice!

Minor thing: on the profile page, the rank suffix is confusing in capital letters, it looks like an acronym. For instance 4 TH would be clearer as 4th.

2 Likes

Hey, I just wanted to say that the quest map and the badges were really key to motivation, compared to two years ago where I didn’t know much or cared enough. Progressing through it allowed me to push further and attempt a top 500. Therefore, I agree this is useful and important to attract and retain players.

Now that I have seen more of what is out there (other competitive platforms, streamers, competitor programmers’ channels), I’d like to say that I do link my codingame profile in my resume, but as was said before this still doesn’t say much about what you can really do.

That’s why I plan to publish analysis of games and puzzles, because that’s probably the best thing you can do to showcase your analysis , design, communication skills. A badge doesn’t say enough, unless the recruiter knows what it takes to get it.

Also, some badges are a bit misleading, for example, I got legend in optimization despite not knowing much about it. I don’t think code golf matters for real world programs because readibility is very important. Other platforms like LeetCode measure time/memory usage and give you feedback on that. They do a better job of teaching you about optimizations.

Lastly, while I feel like CodinGame is the most fun platform, it is not as good when it comes to translating that into job interviews and opportunities. At least that was my experience. But it’s still very good for beginners.

EDIT: typos.

3 Likes