Is there a way to make some lessons visible to some students while leaving them locked for others? This could be useful for requiring students to turn in their paper app before allowing them to move on to App Lab in Unit 4, or else for making some lessons into extension activities.
We found a workaround by creating a second section that has those units unlocked, but this is obviously not an ideal solution. Thank you!
This is interesting but I don’t think there is a way to do this and it seems like it would involve some thought from code.org on how to implement.
Some colleagues and I also chatted about this and couldn’t find how. It would be a great feature for our diverse learners.
Stantons,
Agree - the feature in Google Classroom (where you can hand out assignments to certain students) has been great. Allowed for differentiation in the classroom where students can work on their assignment - even if its not the same one, it’s the one that is right for them!
Brad
I hope code.org is working on this, I got a new student today, and would rather start him at the beginning of unit 2, not unit 2 lesson 13 where my other students are right now.
I realize that this is not the perfect answer, but I have created separate classes for these students so I could control their access independently from others.
While I like a lot of things about this program, it has been 5 years since this original post and it appears there have been no changes made on this very important issue. It is a matter of a teacher being able to control the sequence of completion within a project (completing the project guide) in order to assure students have a good understanding of what is expected before moving on to the actual code.org lesson project. Lack of this control causes students to begin the coding before they have demonstrated a good understanding of what they need to do and how they need to do it. Or it causes the other teams that are ready to move on to have to wait for the others to catch up. This system needs to be modified to help improve the class flow. We should not have to create another class to accomplish this for project flow. In this case (not in SPED cases) it is too confusing & cumbersome, and I don’t believe that is the goal of the program, that in many other ways, is quite user-friendly.
Although this has been brought up on the forum before, a lot of priorities had to change during the pandemic to make the curriculum more friendly for “remote” students, so many things the developers did have planned were postponed and only now are starting to roll out.
The developers are still responsive, and I don’t know what’s on their current priority list, or if this has been requested directly, but the best way to make this request is by emailing support@code.org as the developers don’t frequent the forum.
One of the issues is that you can’t really lock a unit at all. You can hide it, but if the students have the URL, they can still access it. That’s both a blessing and a curse.
It does allow me, for example, to embed the links to the different levels in my canvas course (and I know others who do this with Google Classroom, for example), and students never really go to their code.org dashboard to even see what is “unlocked”.
This way, I control the. flow through my content management system (Canvas) and I don’t lock or unlock anything in code.org.
Some would still like to be able to “lock” a level (not just hide it) and that is the functionality that isn’t available.
Personally, I would find that tedious to lock some students and unlock them when they are ready, but I completely understand why many teachers would want to be able to do that.
I hope it will some day come, but hopefully you can find a workaround that works for you until it does.
Mike
I can see both sides of this. A great example of what I see @contreras_denise might be seeing is in Unit 2 where students are asked to complete mini projects. The first 2 bubbles of the lesson are review and the 3rd bubble starts the project. Students are asked to complete portions of the project guide before continuing on to bubble 3 - this is contradictory to the flow of other lessons. I would love to be able to lock, in this case, bubble 3 until students showed completion of the project guides. This might be a great thing to request to the developers.
We use Schoology and we can imbed links too but, unless I am not understanding certain special functions your learning management system has that Schoology does not have, it really doesn’t address the issue of preventing students who have not finished the planning guide leading to a mini project (or a larger project) from moving on to the project in code.org. I think the inquiry was originally posed as “locked” but I wouldn’t want to have to go through the locking/unlocking procedures like with their assessments or pre/post tests for projects; I just want to be able to allow students to move on to the projects as teams, not as a class. There is already a side window that has the list of student names. If they can add a view project option there to open them up indiviually as they progress, that would be ideal and, to me, not cumbersome at all. I did also bring this up in a recent survey they had so hopefully it can be addressed soon.