Giving Credit for Individual Lessons?

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I have 220 students, so I don’t have time to look at everyone’s actual work to grade every lesson, and sadly, most students won’t do the work if it’s not being graded. (I definitely do grade the mini-projects.) As a result, I usually just check the green circles on the progress page. However, on the lesson levels that have a finish button image, some of my students have figured out that they just have to click it in order to make the circle green. So, they receive a good grade for an activity they didn’t do. Does anyone have a work-around for this?

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Hi swansse,

I totally get it. This is the case for me in CSP as well. I have a few ideas and I approach it different ways depending on how the students are doing:

  1. Of course, the first option is to ignore it because you are basically grading the skill in the mini-project. BUT, if you are noticing skills are dropping off because they aren’t doing it, then you probably want to be more diligent in grading it.
  2. I create short quizzes that ask questions on the skills being learned. AI does a great job of generating Game Lab code you can paste into a blank project to get the code blocks. I generated this sample quiz in less than 5 minutes. The questions still don’t have the code blocks but you could add those. Don’t want to grade this? I pass out the quiz on paper and then have them enter A, B, C or D etc on a graded Google form. Takes a little time to setup but it is worth it when 220 quizzes are quickly graded and you have it year after year:) Here’s the prompt I used you could adjust:
    Create Code.org Game Lab examples and multiple-choice / alternate-style questions for Computer Science Discoveries (CSD) students — focusing on conditional statements (like if, if/else) that update a score when sprites interact.
  3. Sometimes I call “pop-quiz” and have students switch seats to a chair of a student they don’t know. I pass out examples of how the code should look and what the code should be doing on a particular “bubble”. Students grade their peers based on a simple rubric and circle what is missing. I don’t make it worth many points. The intent is really to just let the students know it COULD be graded. I can then go look at the few that didn’t get the correct grade. Of course, students could go back and correct their code BUT that isn’t a bad thing:) You can look at version history if you wanted to.

These are just some ideas that I use. Hope they help. Others might respond with their ideas.

~Michelle