Codecademy is a website that hopes to teach the world to code using interactive games and cumulative lessons. Now the company has launched a project called Code Year that intends to get people to sign up for a weekly coding class as a new year’s resolution and has signed up more than 124 000 people in less than a week.

The Code Year project saw almost 100 000 people signing up within 48 hours of the site going live. At time of writing, sign-ups are growing at a rate of 1 000/hour.

The first lesson is e-mailed on Mondays to those who have registered via the site. Registration isn’t essential because the lessons are subsequently posted and archived on the site the idea is to provide a regular weekly lesson that builds on the previous week’s offering.

Though the core website has been operational since August last year, it lacked a cohesive curriculum and allowed users to dip into various sections and then into individual lessons. With Code Year, the company wants to create a more structured approach for aspiring programmers.

The site offers beginner courses that include a basic overview of programming, an introduction to defining functions in JavaScript, and a beginner’s guide to JavaScript for those users already familiar with other programming languages.

The company says it plans to expand the scope of the lessons on offer and the languages covered in coming months, with the first additions expected to be lessons in using the object-oriented language Ruby and the popular Python.

Codecademy also offers a “labs” feature that allows users to code in Ruby, Python or JavaScript without the need to download a desktop editor.

The site is backed by a number of investors, including Union Square Ventures, O’Reilly, SV Angel, Yuri Milner, Thrive Capital, CrunchFund and Vivi Nevo. — Craig Wilson, TechCentral