Primary school students – or adults that are complete computer novices — looking to learn programming skills now have a new resource with a sequence of online classes from Kahn Academy. Kahn has been assembling more than 3000 free self-paced videos on a wide variety of science, math, and other topics. This week they have added computer science basics to their repertoire.

The Kahn site is a busy one, with close to 3 million unique visitors monthly taking its classes. The idea behind the computer classes was to attract a mix of students of all ages from middle school to adults, and to be both a supplement to an existing class or offer introductions to programming for newbies.

The programming skills are broken down into functional operations, including drawing objects on screen, using Boolean operators and if statements (shown here), and interacting with user input. All the code is graphical and can be edited in real time so that the student can instantly see the results of their code, and share with others. You can recognize the Javascript code here.

The exercises were developed by a team led by John Resig, who created jQuery. Rather than teach a particular programming language, the Kahn exercises are more basic building blocks of coding. Resig mentioned they plan on expanding the offerings to more language-specific topics if there is interest. So far, they have seen a wide variety of early users on the site.

“Our hope is that this platform will make Computer Science education more accessible and encourage excitement and increased interest in the field,” he said.

Kahn isn’t the only source of online programming tutorials, of course, and there are a wide variety of classes for adult learners too. Earlier this summer the major tech universities have created the site called Class Central. The site provides a one-stop listing of classes from multiple different educational efforts, including Coursera, Udacity and others. These online classes cover a broad range of topics outside of computer science, are free and start at specific dates, just like their physical counterparts. For example, you can take a five week-long class taught by two University of California at Berkeley professors on understanding Software as a Service software engineering. They will teach you agile programming techniques using Ruby on Rails and how to deploy it in the cloud using Github and Heroku. Each class has a short intro video explaining what else you will be doing. This is a hands-on class, and comes with coupons for discounts on Amazon’s Web Services too.

Another good place to get general computer science training is CodeAcademy. It is limited in terms of number of difference course offerings. It is self-paced so you don’t have to wait for the class to start as you do with the Coursera or Udacity classes.

Still, the Kahn Academy effort is notable in trying to distill the concepts so that anyone can learn to code, and could be a good place to start before attempting one of the college-level classes.