We had an amazing cohort of interns working at Khan Academy this summer. Here’s a taste of what a few of them were up to:

Jamie Wong - computer science, developer tools

Ben Alpert - man about town

Ankit Ahuja - video discussions

Omar Rizwan - exercises, coaching, tomfoolery

Dylan Vassallo - datastore

It’s incredible and humbling what our intern team has been able to achieve in one short summer!

Intern Dylan Vassallo has been working this summer to convert our Google App Engine datastore to use the next-generation “NDB” Python API.

Read more about Dylan’s experience in converting our system to use NDB. And if you’re considering upgrading your App Engine to use NDB, don’t miss A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Upgrading App Engine models to NDB.

Today we’re happy to announce the Khan Academy’s brand new Computer Science platform!

We think you’ll find that this platform is quite different: Over everything else we wanted to emphasize creativity and exploration and make it approachable for people of all ages, including young kids.

Sal Khan and John Resig recorded a video giving a good introduction to what we’re releasing:

John has also written up a detailed blog post that goes into the nitty-gritty of what we’ve built and why.

Without too much delay you should get straight to it:
http://www.khanacademy.org/cs

We hope you enjoy it!

From everyone on the CS team:

- John, Jessica, and Jamie

Jamie Alexandre

Until yesterday, embedding a Khan Academy video in your blog or website meant giving up features like point-tracking and multilingual subtitle support, by using YouTube’s default embed code. Now, using the Share > Embed option below a video on Khan Academy gives you embed code that allows you to provide a richer Khan Academy experience directly from your own site, allowing viewers to earn points, track progress, and view subtitles in multiple languages.

Here’s an example of what an embedded video would look like on your blog:

Monty Hall Problem: Presentation and analysis of the famous Monty Hall Problem

We’ve also worked with embed.ly to make linking and embedding Khan Academy content through other websites and services even easier, such as through their Wordpress, Drupal, or Joomla plugins (and see here for an API example). Now — go forth, and get embedding!

Last Friday evening and Saturday day, we had a Healthy Hackathon at Khan Academy.

We “hacked” (coded) new ideas as fast as possible, but “healthily” (veggie snacks and no over-nighters). Then we voted on the projects.

One winner was intern Dylan Vassallo, who created a Chrome browser plugin for Wikipedia, “Khanpedia”. With it, when you visit Wikipedia and click on links there, you have the option of viewing the result in either Wikipedia or Khan Academy.

Download Dylan’s “Khanpedia” Chrome browser plugin here.

It is an unoffical hack project, but we think you’ll enjoy it!

Learn more about the technical details here.