Learn JavaScript one small question at a time

CurlyScript is a free game for complete beginners. You join the School of Scriptology in Preschool, with Professor Curly, and work your way up to College, where you build small web apps of your own.

Start learning

Free, nothing to sign up for, and it works on phones and computers.

Predict the output

let apples = 3;
apples = apples + 2;
console.log(apples);

What does this print?

Welcome to the School of Scriptology

Most coding tutorials are written by people who have forgotten what it was like to know nothing.

They say “just loop through the array” as if you were born knowing what a loop is. You weren’t. Nobody was.

So we built a school for complete beginners, and we started it at Preschool. Your very first lesson answers the question everyone else skips: what is a program, anyway? From there you go up one grade at a time, and every new idea builds on one you already know.

Class starts whenever you’re ready.

Who you’ll meet

  • Professor Curly Your teacher, and a curly brace. He walks the map with you, explains every answer, and earns new hats and colors as you learn.
  • Professor Semicolon Head of the school. Explains everything with boxes, recipes and robots, and ends every sentence with a semicolon;
  • Buggsy The troublemaker. Sneaks bugs into code and waits for you in the test at the end of every grade. You’ll beat him. A lot.

From Preschool to College

Twenty grades and sixty lessons, with a test against Buggsy at the end of each grade. Every school builds on the one before, so you never meet something you haven’t been taught.

See everything each school teaches

Or read the course notes, free

  1. Kiddie School

    Preschool and Kindergarten

    What JavaScript is, and your very first program.

  2. Elementary School

    Grades 1 to 5

    Variables, data types, operators, decisions and loops.

  3. Middle School

    Grades 6 to 8

    Functions, arrays and objects: the big three.

  4. Summer School

    Debugging camp

    Bugs, errors, and how to squash them.

  5. High School

    Grades 9 to 13

    Closures, array power tools, the DOM, events and modern JavaScript.

  6. College

    Freshman to Senior Year

    Async code, classes, modules, and guided projects: a calculator, a to-do list, a quiz game and a weather app.

What a lesson looks like

Short questions with the explanation right after, and the course notes open beside you when you want more.

Pick a lesson, answer, see why. The map shows where you are in the school, and every question explains itself, right or wrong.
A page of the notes explaining variables, with a code example that has Run and Watch it run buttons
Read the page behind it. Every lesson links to its pages in the course notes: 218 pages, with more than 450 code examples.
Watch it run: a program shown one line at a time, with each variable’s value listed below
Watch it run. Step through a program line by line and see every variable change.

Questions people ask

Is it really free?
Yes. While CurlyScript is in early access, everything on this website is free, including the extras that will be part of CurlyScript Plus in the apps: the guided projects, every Dojo belt and the progress reports.
Do I need to know anything first?
No. The first lesson starts with what a program is. If you can read and use a phone or a computer, you can start.
Is it OK for children?
Yes. Kiddie School is written for young beginners. There are no ads in the game, and nothing about children is collected (accounts are only for players 13 and over). We only count anonymous things, like how many people finish the first lesson.
Where is my progress saved?
In your browser, on this device. To carry on somewhere else, use Download backup in the game’s settings, then Load a backup on the other device.
Is there an app?
Android and iPhone apps are on the way. Until then, you can put the website on your phone’s home screen and it opens like an app. It takes four taps: here’s how, on Android and iPhone.

Lesson one takes a few minutes

Your progress saves as you go, so you can stop and carry on whenever you like.

Start learning