Workspaces

Workspaces is an online editor and development environment that is integrated with the Treehouse learning system. 

At its core, Workspaces a web-based editor that includes a development console allowing students to work on projects ranging from simple websites, to Python, Ruby, and JavaScript applications. The student’s work is all stored in the cloud so they can develop from any computer that includes a web browser. Workspaces lets students develop and work without needing to setup a toolchain on their local machines, or shared computers.

Since Workspaces is integrated with Treehouse, it gives our teachers the opportunity to teach their materials using a controlled setup that will exactly match up to what the student is using. This eliminates student confusion stemming from things like cross platform differences, changes in tooling made over time, and restrictions on installing software to their machines. 

Workspace code templates are associated with course videos, allowing a student to click a button and launch Workspaces with the correct environment, and start coding for the course.

Uploading Files to a Workspace

Step 1: Download the files as instructed by the teacher in whatever course you’re currently on. Usually, these files are located in the Project Files/Zip File found on the video page you’re currently on, in the Downloads tab.

Step 2: Now that you’ve downloaded the Project File.zip, you’ll need to be able to properly open it. We do that by using an extraction tool to ‘unzip’ them. If you are unsure if you have an extraction tool or not, download the tool called 7-Zip from http://www.7-zip.org/download.html

Now that you have your extraction tool downloaded and installed, navigate to where your Project File.zip is located, right click on it and select 7-zip from the menu that appears (or whatever extraction tool you use) and then select the option that says something along the lines of Extract to “whatever-the-file-name-is-called”

Step 3: You should now have two folders, one still being compressed (zipped) and the other now decompressed (unzipped). Go ahead and click on the unzipped folder to safely access the contents within it.

Step 4: You can now begin moving your files within the unzipped folder to your Workspace. Do this by selecting the files you desire (in the example below, we just moved over the image files found in the ‘img’ folder of the Project File we downloaded) and then dragging and dropping them into the bottom left hand corner of your Workspace.

If you’ve done everything properly, your files should have successfully uploaded into your Workspace where you can then move them into their desired folders within your workspace. We hope this guide has helped!