Abandonment is heavily front-loaded: a third of all abandonments happen on the very first exercise, maze-solve-basic, and 38% of those abandoners made zero attempts (classic “signed up, bounced” churn rather than “got stuck” churn)
fix-wall is the first real friction point: 89% done, but 76% of its abandoners did attempt it
foxy-face / penguin / cloud-rain-sun / jumbled-house form a difficulty cliff mid-course: completion drops to 80–92%, median attempts jump to 17–32, and median completion times hit 15–25 minutes with p90s in the hundreds of minutes (people leaving and coming back across sessions)
Late-course exercises like bouncer-dress-code, stripey-fabric, annalyns-infiltration, build-wall have high times/attempts but tiny abandonment (y’all addicted by then )
Perhaps many students leave Jiki at the first exercise because they (mistakenly) think that this isn’t “proper” programming, i.e. it doesn’t look like the computer code they’ve seen on Mr. Robot. Maybe it’s too reminiscent of the sort of coding they did in school with something like Scratch.
Not sure why Fix the Wall is a friction point… but I come from a graphics background so maybe there are people out there who get freaked out by xy coordinates.
Again, not sure why anyone would find the early drawing exercises difficult. I suspect there are people around who think that unless you are drawing at an Atelier level, this is an activity that only kids do.
My first friction point came with the relational exercises. I love math, but use it so rarely, even the simplest calculations take a while until my brain shifts into the correct mode.
Hardest exercise so far for me (I’m up to Annalyn’s Infiltration) was Bouncer: Dress Code. Had to spend a lot more time on that one than I’m prepared to admit to
One more thing: I’ve only looked at the tips when I’ve got a working solution. Sometimes I’ll refactor my solution after reading the tips but I prefer to work everything out first by myself. There’s been more than a few moments when I’ve wondered how much time and work I’d have saved myself if I’d sneaked a look at the tips first
Exactly. For me, the best thing about these exercises and also the premium projects i have done is the way they have shaped my thinking. On some exercises and projects, i am like, this looks impossible to solve and then as i keep grinding and working on the solution in my notebook, different paths open up. In fact, sometimes at the end even i am surprised as to how did i crack this. In fact, i am already experiencing these neural pathways that really open up your mind.
The best thing about JIKI for me is that it is shaping us how to think and explore and i feel, specially in this era of AI and all, that is the most important skill
Also, falling in love with the thinking and coding more and more after each exercise and project
PS - I have called premium projects as projects and not challenges because they were still projects when i completed my previous project
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