We love feedback!! It helps us improve. Tell us what you like and what you didn’t like and what you wish we had done differently. We will take your thoughts and ideas and use them to make us better! This section of the forum will be used to help us plan our strategy for continuing and improving teacher PD - we won’t be checking it constantly for bug fixes, questions, or immediate issues. If you have one of those, read below.
If you come across a bug, broken link, or typo while working on a level in Code Studio, you can report it by clicking the “report bug” link in the upper right hand and fill in a description of the bug. Send other bug reports to support@code.org and include a description of the bug and what operating system and browser version you’re using. ex: Windows 7, Internet Explorer 9.
If you have a question about anything, it may have already been answered. Check http://support.code.org for the answers.
It would be great to have unit specific extra puzzles for students that want to practice or review a specific topic or course. One way to generate these extra puzzles would be user generated content. As a teacher, I would love the flexibility to create new puzzles for my class or even assign groups a project where they create puzzles of their own. Instead of your staff wading through all the puzzles that are submitted, you could give any user who has completed at least 2 courses the option to become a “reviewer.” This would offer a way to reward and acknowledge dedicated students giving them a way to give back and become part of the team. Likewise, I would love to have the opportunity to become more involved. I want to click the button that says, “Join the team.” You don’t have to pay me, I just want to help in any way I can.
Thanks for the feedback and for volunteering to help!
We like your idea of allowing teachers and students to create new puzzles for a class - it’s a great idea! We’ve added it to our set of features we would love to have. It may be a little while before we are able to build that functionality into our platform, but we definitely see the need for it too.
We greatly appreciate your wish to be more involved. I sent you an email (to the email you listed on the forum) with more information about contributing.
I checked support.code.org and didn’t find this, so I’ll ask here.
Is there a question bank for pre-tests or post-tests for Exploring Computer Science? I need to give both a pre-test and a post-test for the course. I’d rather not start from scratch if questions already exist.
ECS has been working with SRI to create an assessment for ECS, however it has not been released yet. I would create a topic on the forum for now and see if you can find other teachers who want to create the same thing. If something gets released we will notify teachers.
Not sure where to put this suggestion. I have used Code.org off and on for the last couple of years but today I participated in a Code.org facilitated workshop. When our facilitator was showing us the Student Accounts and Progress dashboard, he showed how you could check the student’s solution against the actual solution. I noticed that when you did this the actual solution replaced the student’s solution so you had to toggle back and forth to see what might be different. I feel a better solution would be to have the actual solution show up next to the student’s solution, so a teacher could do a quick comparison.
I have recently begun using code.org with a second grade class. The experience has been very positive. The one change I would love to see has to do with the feedback given by the site for incomplete puzzles. Right now, the learner gets a message that tells them their solution is not correct. So much of the time, by the time I get to the student they have cleared the workspace and want me to walk them through from the beginning. Much of the time, I even see them pulling to the trash can a significant amount of work that look pretty close to what they need.
It would be great if the response given could take into account how on track the student is. The easiest fix would be for work that has no mistakes but is still incomplete. It is very hard to convince students to run their program often enough, especially when running it early gives them a sad face type response. A response like “Your on the right track” or “Good so far” would really help keep students motivated.
Education science has come a long way and it is fairly well accepted that an encouraging response fuels learning where a flat “your wrong” puts the breaks on. Any way the responses could be geared to praise what the student has right as opposed to what they have wrong would encouraged them to stick it out and fix their mistakes opposed to starting over or giving up. Running your program should be encouraging not discouraging. I want my students to hit the run button all the time and get a boost of confidence as they see themselves inch closer to their goal.
Again, love the site! Code.org and Khan Academy are 2 of my favorite resources for learners ever.
Hi hyperclick_server,
Thank you for your comments! This is very timely feedback, because we’re actually in the middle of reworking the way that we display errors, feedback, and hints to the students. One of the big things we’re doing is moving that big popup that students get when they’re wrong to a smaller “speech bubble” from the instructions character that students can ignore (without even clicking “Ok”) if they are just iterating on their code. In addition, we’re looking at ways to provide more constructive feedback based on student progress, but that is a more complex undertaking, so in the meantime it’s our hope that the new lightweight feedback will help mitigate this problem for many students.
Is there anyway to get the solutions to the Unit 2 Coding Activities. I worked them all out yesterday, and made copies of the coding answers. I thought there might be a better way to check and assist students with their coding.
I love all the math that Discoveries indirectly teaches students. One change I’d highly recommend is making the “y” axis more like how it is in math class.
Students at the middle school level still get confused with how the coordinate plane works. And having it backwards from what it is in math is really hard on students.
I understand that it is set up that way in code.org because that’s how it is in real life JavaScript. But if students are serious about coding and learning JS later in life, they can easily learn how the real JS y-axis works.
For now, please change it so it is just like math and put in the resources for teachers that real JS isn’t like that.