Product Updates - May through July 2018

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Here are the latest updates we've made across the Code.org website and platform.  To see updates from previous months, please see the bottom of this article.

Videos

  • We recently made an important IT change relating to how our videos are presented for classrooms that may have YouTube or other URLs blocked. You can read about this change here.

Teacher Experience

  • We revamped the 'view progress' tab in your teacher dashboard, which will now show vertically-filling bars for each lesson to make it easier to view your classroom progress at a glance. 

  • Teachers can also see pair programming icons in the detailed view of the progress tab to see where students were paired:

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  • The assessments tab for CS Principles and CS Discoveries teachers has been redesigned to be more user-friendly. You'll be able to easily see top questions that students are struggling with, as well as assessment results for individual students.

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  • Teachers can now provide written feedback for students on most CS Principles and CS Discoveries levels:

 

Accounts

  • We updated the experience for deleting your account to make it clearer what action you're taking. We changed some layout on the 'account settings' page so that the “Delete” button appears more separate and visually striking, and we'll ask you additional confirmation questions to ensure you're aware of all effects.
  • PowerSchool users can now create a new account or log into an existing account directly through PowerSchool. This works for both teachers and students. 

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  • We now ask EU users to consent to transferring their data to the US. This is enforced on account creation or via a consent dialog (if they already have an account). This is a GDPR requirement.

Website & Curriculum

  • The new 2018 versions of Courses A-F are now available, and are the defaults on the teacher dashboard! These new courses contain tons of changes based on what we learned in the last year, including new lessons, ramp-ups, and Sprite Lab. Read more about these courses here.
  • We added the text to speech button to the 2018 versions of the CS Discoveries and CS Principles courses.
  • Students are now less likely to crash their browser after placing a function call inside the definition of that same function (this is known as recursion), which causes an infinite loop. We’ve now improved our ability to catch these cases and prevent crashes.
  • The Code.org Advocacy Coalition is a non-partisan group of 60 organizations that believe computer science should be part of the core curriculum in education. Together, the coalition has been driving 9 policies to make computer science a fundamental part of the K-12 education system. Previously, we linked to the Advocacy Coalition with https://code.org/advocacy, but now we’ve redesigned and given it its very own home at https://advocacy.code.org. This new landing page will be the go-to destination for advocates looking to support computer science education bills and policies in their state.

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App Lab / Game Lab 

  • You can now export your animations from Game Lab as a GIF or individual image file.

 

  • When duplicating a design element to another screen in AppLab, it sometimes isn’t clear that anything happened because the other screen might end up looking identical. So now we show a temporary pop up on the display screen:

  • App Lab now has a “Copy to screen” feature that lets you duplicate an element to another screen in design mode:

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  • We added basic mobile support for Game Lab apps. Mouse clicks map to touch events, and arrow keys map to the D-Pad and the spacebar maps to the orange button.

 

 CS Fundamentals

  • Toolbox categories are now translatable. In the past, category names were not hooked up to be translated. Translations are now coming in, pictured here in Spanish (left panel):

  • We added a grid overlay to Collector puzzles. This was a very common stumbling block for students that was reported by teachers and facilitators. While the cave walls have a grid pattern, Collector puzzles involve many wide-open spaces, which were hard to count out.

 

If you've any questions on these updates, feel free to contact us at support@code.org.

Previous product updates can be found here:

 

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