A few days ago, freeCodeCamp’s Responsive Web Design Certification, which had been in beta since December 2021, was fully released to the web.

The updated curriculum teaches the fundamentals of web development through a hands-on approach and continues to offer a free certificate of completion.

freeCodeCamp is updating its other certifications: the Database Certification is in beta; the JavaScript Certification will be next; and others will follow through 2023.

New Curriculum

Practice project to learn typography: code editor (left) — preview of finished project (right).

At Class Central, we’re big fans of freeCodecamp and its free coding certifications. In fact, we used freeCodecamp’s webdev certification in two of our bootcamps — coincidentally right before and right after the beta overhaul, so we saw the curriculum evolve firsthand.

To me, the most significant change is that the new certification truly embraces project-based learning. Rather than alternating phases of theory and practice, it blurs the line between the two, structuring the entire curriculum as a sequence of in-browser coding projects.

The learning experience has also been refined at the project level. Previously, explanations lived in one pane, and your code in another. Now, explanations sit right inside your code, as you can appreciate in the image above, making the explanation-to-code mapping readily apparent.

(If you’d like to know more about the reasoning that led to the updated instructional design, read this post from freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson, as well as his replies peppered throughout the thread.)

Free Certificate

freeCodeCamp certificate earned by my colleague @Archisha

Something that hasn’t changed, fortunately, is that you’ll still earn a free certificate of completion like the one above once you’ve passed the certification’s five summative projects, which include coding a webform, a product landing page, and a personal portfolio page.

Future Improvements

The freeCodeCamp community has been working on improving freeCodeCamp’s other certifications in a similar manner — most notably, by reframing them in terms of projects:

• The Relational Databases Certification is already in beta.

• The JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures Certification is also being overhauled.

• The Front End Development Libraries Certification should be next.