I would like to start teaching the CS Discoveries course in my middle school STEM class and we are a 1:1 iPad district. Is anyone successfully teaching CS Discoveries only using iPads? If so, what are some tips for implementation and issues that may arise?
Hi @shana.deans Welcome to the forum!
Here are some other posts that might help you find some ideas:
Thank you. I think I may stick with CS Fundamentals for now and try it myself with the iPad first.
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I tried with iPads, and failed completely.
Express Course and fundamentals will work, but the other “chapters” will not.
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CS Discoveries is officially supported on iPads according to the code.org IT requirements web page (or I would not have taught the class this year):
All CS Discoveries, CS Principles, and Intro to App Lab courses are not compatible with tablets or mobile devices - a full keyboard and mouse (or touchpad, like on MacBooks) are required. Most tablets are not supported, with the following exceptions:
Microsoft Surface Pro with an external keyboard
iPad running iPadOS 13.4 or later with an external keyboard and an external mouse or touchpad
I’ve been teaching CSD this year (for the first time) to eighth-grade students who are using iPads. Our Middle School is 1:1 with iPads that are in a Logitech keyboard case so they all have keyboards.
My class meets five times over a two week rotation (usually) so I’m only doing parts of some of the units. We completed Unit 1, Chapter 1 and Unit 2, Chapter 2 from Sept to Dec 2022 with very few problems. The Inspector could work a bit better for Unit 2 (Web Development), but it was usable. Here are two tips I taught my students regarding that:
- To make Inspector Tool button appear, toggle the expand Preview area button. (hide/show Files and Workspace areas.
- With Inspector On, tap to place cursor in Workspace and Web Lab will highlight Preview area that created by that code.
Currently, you can select code and have the inspector point out what it affects in the Preview area, but not the other way around. We were not using external mice yet during Unit 2. (See below about Unit 3.) That might have helped with the Inspector a bit, but everyone got by ok with the more limited Inspector functionality I described during Unit 2 Chapter 1. (We did not do Chapter 2.)
We started Unit 3 (Animations and Games) in December. I have a classroom set of Lightening to USB adapters (about $10 each on Amazon) and USB wired mice that students connect to their iPads when working in class in addition to already having keyboards as part of the iPad case. This works pretty well. (All iPads are running iPad OS 15 or 16.). I ended up having them connect mice primarily because without an external mouse, you can’t MouseOver in order to get the brief explanations for blocks and the opportunity to click on Example for more details. (Plus programming with MouseOver is something coming up for us in Unit 3.) I’m a big advocate for students looking up things themselves as I don’t require them to memorize much of anything as long as they become skilled at using the available online resources to efficiently look things up. (I have a degree in Computer Science from many years ago, pre-Java/JavaScript, and have sporadically programmed in a few different languages, and I look up syntax all the time.)
I do have one problem that has come up recently during Unit 3 starting with Lesson 6. Sometimes for students who choose to workin text mode instead of block mode, moving the cursor around with the arrow keys is not right. It skips around and doesn’t render the text on that line properly. I can reproduce this on demand on multiple iPads including my own so if someone from code.org wants to get information from me to work on this problem, I can provide more details via support.
Anyway, I don’t have a perfect solution for this at the moment. However, as of a couple of days ago I found that when this occurs, the cursor behaves better if student switch Safari out of Desktop mode (the default in iPad OS 15 and 16) to Mobile browser mode. Even though code.org puts up a banner saying mobile browser is not recommend, the cursor situation is resolved. (I don’t know if other problems will be caused by using mobile instead of desktop mode in the future.)
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Hi @bcampbell
First off, welcome to the forum! Second, thank you so much for sharing your experiences with this. This is an excellent synopsis of your experiences and I know it’ll help others using iPads for WebLab and GameLab in the future!