Product Updates: November 2018 through March 2019

Here are the latest updates we've made across the Code.org website and platform! Updates from previous months can be found at the bottom of this article. 

Professional Development

• Teacher applications for middle and high school professional development are open across the country! You can learn more about professional learning in your region (workshop information, cost, and more) here. 

App Lab, Game Lab, and Sprite Lab

• Sprite Lab is silent no more, with a new sound block! We built a “play sound” block and hooked it up to the Game Lab sound library.

• More fonts in App Lab! We now support 13 fonts in App Lab, and allow users to customize the fonts of their UI elements.

• Lists can now be watched in App Lab and Game Lab. 

• App Lab and Game Lab Debugger Improvements. We improved the following error and warning messages:

  • “TypeError: undefined is not a function" now displays the object and method that students attempted to call (ex: “sprite.doMove() is not a function”

  • For reserved words, we now display a more user-friendly message. (ex: “for is a reserved word in Game Lab. Use a different variable name.”

  • We also removed the “event” parameter from the default “onEvent” block. Most students didn’t use this, and that caused their code to be cluttered with unhelpful warnings that it was not used in their program.

  • Error messages within conditional statements now point to a more useful line number.

• Various Sprite Lab bug fixes, including:

  • Conflicting variable/sprite names can no longer clobber functions or break Sprite Lab

  • Removing set background block now updates live preview

  • Sound previews now play in the sound dialog

• Various improvements to App Lab to address common pain points, including:

  • Slowing down your turtle in turtle mode is even slower than before.

  • Added a confirmation dialog for deleting an image that is in use. We continue to see patterns in our data and receive reports that suggest students are unintentionally deleting images from their project without understanding the implications. We added a new confirmation step explaining that they are deleting an image that is in use.

Teacher Features

• Teacher panel on Unit Overview page now displays students in a section. Clicking on a student displays that student’s unit progress. This work also allowed us to remove an extra page from our teacher dashboard hierarchy and use this page for two purposes.

• OneNote Notebook for CS Discoveries has been released to Beta! Teachers can now set up a class OneNote Notebook that is populated with resources and activities from our CSD course and contains collaboration space for teachers and students. Teachers need a free, Office 365 teacher account to access the notebook, and their students also need free O365 accounts to use the notebook. To get a free Microsoft teacher account, go here. To setup a CSD OneNote Notebook, go here. 

  

Platform

• We updated our Microsoft account integration, to now allow for logging in via Office 365 authentication!
• We launched an updated pair programming video.

• We made improvements to avoid confusion between working on the 2017 version of a course, and the 2018 versions. Redirects are in place so that students who haven’t made progress on an older version of a course and are not assigned to an older version of the course will be always be taken to the newer version of the course.

International

• Fixed voice playback for non-English languages in courses A-F - previously, voice playback was not working in courses A-F for non-English languages. This bug has been fixed!

Hour of Code 

• We launched Dance Party! Code a Dance Party to share with your friends, to the tune of 30+ hit songs!

• A ton of Minecraft updates! We have done a big wave of asset and feature updates for the Minecraft: Voyage Aquatic tutorial, including:

Alex and Steve in a Boat!

Scuba-style!

Coral reef maze!