I agree wholeheartedly. I have tried over and over to get into programming and web building. I can go through the courses, retain some knowledge, but when it comes time to build something I'm lost. I feel too often these services focus too much on the middle, but not the beginning and end. As you said, understanding and learning about loops are important, but should not be the full focus.
For example the API stuff on Codecademy doesn't go into the full picture of how you build this into page. I have struggled mightily with understanding how the whole process works. I would love to find a service that walks me through building a page in Flask, hosting it and integrating it into APIs of popular services.
I felt like that, when i finished my first programmin course i was like, well how do i make something useful now? Because you know i could solve some Euler problems. Finally when i started to "get it" was simply when i started to do it.
E.g
You break your problem in pieces and start making something.
Wanna make a music player?
Well how do you play music oh theres a library that you call song.play, cool.
How do you read the tags?
How do you get the files? Isnt a playlist just an array?
And so on...
For example the API stuff on Codecademy doesn't go into the full picture of how you build this into page. I have struggled mightily with understanding how the whole process works. I would love to find a service that walks me through building a page in Flask, hosting it and integrating it into APIs of popular services.