Constructive Criticism

Hey guys, this is some friendly feedback here in general for all computer programming courses. In future iterations, I think it would help to always make it clear up front why what you are learning is important, and how what you're learning can be used in real life programming situations. To be more specific, I've noticed with many of these beginner programming classes, you immediately dive into stuff like "Here is how you make a string. now here is how you make a number, etc."... Soon you realize you've spent 4-5 hours learning about strings and numbers but you have no real clue about why this is valuable or how what you learned will be used or where this is all going. To give context, I come to treehouse from another very popular online Ruby On Rails training course and the beautiful thing about it was at the very beginning they show you all the cool stuff you will build in the course. So you have something to work toward. Here, I feel you just get dropped in without a real payoff shown upfront, so it;s hard to stay motivated to complete the lower level, trivial tasks (e.g. "here is how you assign a variable"). As noted before it also feels like there is not much context for what you are learning...you feel more like a parrot, just repeating what is told to you, rather than really understanding the significance of what you're doing.