One of the ways to learn a new language, or to brush up on parts you are not sure about, is to do Koans. Basically, you are given a broken bit of code and have to make it work, much like making unit tests pass.

I learned about them in my Peer to Peer University course when I did the Ruby Koans. They were pretty easy and fun.

I’ve been constructing a JavaScript course and thought using koans for that would be really helpful for students. I grabbed a fork of “JavaScript Koans.” Pretty easy, but I have to flip back and forth between a text editor and the browser to see how I did. With the Ruby Koans, it was all in one screen since it was using a command line interface.

I’ve recently been in love with LiveReload. When you edit a file in a directory, it will reload the HTML file automatically in the browser. No tabbing over and hitting reload or command-R.

Here’s my visual setup. My browser is on the left and my text editor is on the right.

I have LiveReload running and have it pointing to watch the whole Koans directory so that it will see whenever I change one of the JavaScript files. It then reloads the KoansRunner file which shows me my progress. In order to get LiveReload to refresh that file, I put in a snippet of code in the bottom of the HTML file which LiveReload gives you.