I’m new to teaching computer science this year and am using the CS Discoveries curriculum. We started the Interactive Multimedia and Games unit last week. After doing the first two lessons, I was using the Levels screen to view their progress and only formally checking the “Assessment” page. As long as they had a green filled circle on the other parts, it was good. However, I did want to check to see if they actually had to complete the task in order to get a green filled circle and discovered that they don’t have to do anything…just click Submit and it gives them a green filled circle. This is disappointing as it makes it totally invalid as a reference for progress. Is there any way to verify they actually did what the task was without having to go through every screen for every student? If not, is there a place I can download all the solutions so that I can make a Kami page or something for them to screenshot their results for each task in each lesson so that I can check them all at once?
Thanks of your help or any other recommendations for grading and/or verifying student work.
The green bubble system has been described as “something of an artifact from the curriculum development tools we use here at Code.org. There’s certainly instances when they’re useful for tracking student progress, but the curriculum team wouldn’t advise just looking at bubble colors without ever examining student code more closely.”
So, there are a lot of different strategies teachers use. I tend to do what this teacher suggests (ie. check certain levels).
Some of my students caught on to that fact, so then I started telling them they had to do them all and I would check 1 or 2 levels per lesson, but I didn’t tell them which lessons I was going to check. That works for me.
This doesn’t meet everyone’s needs and code.org is aware of that. This post is one of their most recent attempts to help out, but if you have suggestions of other things they could try and implement, you can certainly contact them at support@code.org.
There are other discussion threads discussing teacher strategies for grading throughout the forum. Most of us have found a way to make it work for us, but also eagerly look forward to updated methods!
Thank you so much for the info! I did try searching for other posts but didn’t use a specific enough search term (i.e. green bubbles). It makes sense that there could not be one solution for every lab…some are too subjective. Thank you for your suggestion for only checking a few level per lesson at random. I will give that a try.