I teach grades 3-5 and regularly find students get sucked into the drawing interface at any possible moment. One moment they’re coding, and the next moment they’ve spent many minutes drawing while I’m off helping other students debugging and the class is now over.
I am fine with them spending some time on backgrounds and making new sprites if that’s an area that will keep them excited and engaged, but I want them to save that for the “free play” (at the end of most, if not all lessons).
I have to spend a lot of time correcting students to focus on the code, it would be easier if there was an option that would let me turn off the ability to use the drawing interface at all. Is there such a feature?
Another, semi-related problem I’ve encountered is someone playing with the “add a costume” menu and accidentally adding multiple of the same costume, then in the code it looks like it should work, but secretly there are multiple of the same costume. Ideally, I would restrict kids to not drawing and not adding new costumes except for specific levels. That would help them focus on the projects at hand and spend less time debugging. Is that possible?