Block Jumper || Live Coding Class with the CodeMonkey Founders || Coding Adventure || 2021 HOC Event

Key Takeaways

alrighty thank you to those that are just joining us this morning we'll give everyone about five minutes or so to kind of shuffle in and get everyone kind of ready you could please tell us in the chat box where you're joining us from and what grades you teach and if you have any questions beforehand that you would like to ask our founder you can go ahead and pop those in the q a box other than that we look forward to get starting with you here soon thank you to everyone that is piling in right now for our last hour of code event for the week you please if you haven't done so already please share with us where you're joining us from as well as what grades you teach or currently with right now and if you have any questions beforehand you go ahead and throw those in the chat box otherwise we'll get started here in just a few minutes honoring everyone and being able to give some time for everyone to shuffle in sarah that's a great question and we'll go ahead and save that one towards the end so thank you so much for sharing that question with us all right we're going to get started here in just a couple minutes i know there's been some people i'm having a bit of trouble just please remember that you can also join us on any of our social media platforms youtube facebook and twitter this event is also being live streamed there so if you haven't done so please go ahead and pop in the chat box where you're joining us from and we'll get started in two minutes all righty we are going to go ahead and get started if you are having any issues logging in please make sure to refer everyone to our social media streams as well on facebook twitter and youtube all right thank you so much for joining us for our last webinar of the 2021 hour of code csn week we are so excited to have you here and um if you haven't joined us on our other events this week monday we had a women in stem panel tuesday we had or yesterday we have it had a live coding class with our other founder and that was a about text-based coding and today is going to be about our newest course block jumper so thank you so much and as you guys know this is our favorite event of the year it's our time to share with you how much we love computer science and get to share that with your students as well so we are so appreciative that you're taking the time out of your day to spend it with us and your students because we know that there are a ton of choices during this hour of code week so we feel extra special that you're spending your time with us if you're catching this at a later date or you're watching this on any of our live streams please feel free to throw those questions into the chat box and we just want to thank you if you're watching this now or if you're watching this later and just know how much we do appreciate you and your time please do follow us on all of our social media channels just like today we'll stream live we'll live stream our webinar sessions and share different events it's a way to keep up to date with everything as well as to follow up on any tech news and content that we share along the way as well so today's session is an hour of code with our founder um ido shore so he'll be joining us here in just a few minutes and so we'll be going over our blocks jumper course so let's just talk about the back story and the reason why you're here is about code monkey um in 2014 codemonkey's ido and his brother jonathan shore launch code monkey after working with kids and just seeing how much better they grasp the coding concepts when it was presented in a more fun and gamified way the days of the boring the boring programming ways are way of the past and this is a way to introduce students to those fun and gamified um adventures and make it feel like a game rather than the old school methods of learning how to code and so today codemonkey is a leading fun and intuitive curriculum we do have international users we have users in almost every country where students do learn to code in real programming languages so before getting started we do always like to share with you who you're actually meeting today and who you're going to be seeing and so to kick that off my name is lena salle i've met you hopefully over the last few days during this event and i am the professional development and sales manager here at code monkey and usually help organize these types of events um so you'll probably see me quite a bit today we also have joining with us brett he is the vp of u.s sales so that means that when your teachers are looking for new programs to bring to you then he's the one who's leading the team to help get those tools to each one of you and to your teachers and then we also have maya she is new to the code monkey team and we're lucky to have her and she is our customer success manager and a customer success manager just means that they help the customers have the best success using the product so if your teachers run into issues or maybe you need help with setup there she is there to help you so you'll see her face a lot as well now without further ado we want to introduce you to the superstar of today's event and that is our founder and cto ido shore hi hello welcome [Laughter] thank you for that lovely introduction all right so we're going to dive do you want to tell us a little bit about you before we jump to this next next part uh sure i'm uh you know i live in tel aviv 34 years old and uh yeah i'm the chief technology officer at uh code monkey besides that i like uh playing my guitar and playing ultimate frisbee so yeah that's it about me and you don't see right now because we have these fun backgrounds for the hour of code but he actually is quite the musician and has quite a lot of instruments behind him so um you know the nice it's a nice fact about him fun fact um so today during our webinar we're going to do an intro we discuss a little bit about what code monkey is we're going to dive a little bit deeper into who ito is and what he does and then talk about how code monkey got started then he's going to lead a coding class specifically for you on our new blox jumper course and a dose team especially leads these efforts with all of these courses so you're you're having a really extra special taste of what it looks like and what it feels like to be part of part of us and then we will have open q a with ido and i'm taking some of those questions from pre-registration as well as any questions that have been popped in the chat box or in the q and a so we are going to start off today's event with doing a little bit of an interview type of session with edo so as the cto which he mentioned earlier was the chief technology officer tell us a bit about kind of your role and what you do at code mcgee and exactly what is a cto okay so um i guess studio would mean uh different things at different types of companies codemonkey's product is a technological product it's a an application or website [Music] so as cto i manage building of the product maintaining the product uh which means uh i have a team of uh developers product managers uh part of the product is also uh the curriculum so that's also under my responsibility yes so i just manage a bunch of people uh who make everything that is the user or customer whether it be a student or a teacher playing on uh playing or learning or managing a classroom so all those things so everything that you see and do on code monkey is developed by ido and his team and so he has a really big job um probably the most important job out of all of us making sure that everything works and is fun for all of you as well um so a question we've got a couple of these in the registration as well but um since you are the cto of code monkey what is something that you look for when you do hire a programmer or somebody to work at code monkey uh so that's a good question i would say the biggest part of the interview process is revolves around communication so just being good uh technically and be able to produce uh code on yourself is just uh it's not enough in uh when working in a team um so big part of process is communicating with the candidate about how they made what how do they make their choices when they uh like solve a certain um compute like problem in a computer science and see how well they uh are able to give feedback on other people's codes and receive feedback on their own code so all that around communicating clearly and respectfully is very important and i think that that's an important thing that we see across all places is being able to take feedback and knowing that the feedback isn't meant to carry you down but to actually make you better and so you know feedback goes both ways so i think that's important that you mention that um so we sort of touched on this a little bit there but if you weren't a programmer what career path would you have likely followed yeah so as a teenager i i actually spent probably most of the time uh with my guitar so uh there was a time when i thought about uh music as a career path um that didn't work out uh or actually i kind of i guess i chose uh computer programming over music um i'm glad i did um it ended up pretty well i'm happy uh at my current role and i still get to uh do some music on my spare time which i think is great and we're also very lucky that you chose this career path as well because we wouldn't all be here if it weren't for you so in honor of our code monkey competition that we have going on right now students you can create a drawing and we're going to take those drawings and turn them into avatars that will come into the product as well um so which code monkey avatar do you use um on code marketing so um so i actually have a few accounts because uh i guess anyone who works like on the product needs to have a few accounts as like their main account and the account they test like teacher features and uh student features uh so i have a few avatars but uh my main account is the bear it's just uh i don't know i like him best i also love him in the beaver achiever course he's a good one yeah um you know i'm just basic i just choose the girl with the blonde hair you know on all of my accounts so that's a good text yeah um okay so we asked we asked jonathan this yesterday as well but we wanted to ask you what was the first programming language that you learned ah so the very first one i was pretty young might have been 10 or a little older it was flash um yeah that's it uh adobe flash that was a it wasn't a programming language but it had a programming language in it it was a studio for creating games and uh videos so i just uh messed around in there a little bit creating uh smaller things that required some programming that's my very first programming experience and what did you make here it was a um this was like a small video i think i also made a small at least one small game uh it wasn't as easy as it was today like you had to have it uh installed in your computer then you had to export it and find a way to send it somehow but you could only send like three megabytes in an email and i don't know i remember how i got it working but i could send it to other computers somehow yeah it was much you guys are lucky now because things are much easier when you can just use the web-based version of creating things and having to download it and then wait and sometimes it'd be out of date right and it would be detailed yeah many things i've got have gotten simply in the last 20 years some some things in technology actually became more complicated i would agree with that 100 so this is another i just threw this one this isn't he does specifically but this is one that he saved from when he was younger um but basically there's lots of things that you could do with flash a lot of people made like racing games and different things like that and you could still use flash today right flash programming you probably wouldn't want to it's kind of a dead technology you used to have it in browsers but now browsers don't support flash anymore that's true yeah absolutely it was fun it was a fun time i think i also did when i started teaching taught kids how to do some like flash things too um okay so that's all we're gonna do for this mini intro um interview part with ego and i see lots of you are asking some really amazing questions so we'll be saving those to the end now we're gonna do our lesson time so the first thing first that we want to talk about is we're going to be doing our blocks jumper course and yesterday we talked about text-based coding but let's talk about what is block-based coding uh yes so as this uh lovely animation shows uh this is blockbase coding uh black based coding is when you create a code like an algorithm like basically anything any type of code but you don't use your keyboard to type in text you just drag and drop blocks that connect to each other to express uh the program so black-based coding um [Music] is in like i guess 99 of the case is an educational tool like uh when you develop for uh as your day job you in most cases you won't use block-based code unless it's like uh very specific tools but the benefits of block-based coding is has a lower entry level many mistakes that that are hard to overcome in text-based coding simply cannot be made when doing block-based coding because the blocks prevent you from doing type of things that don't make sense so i could i'll explain a little bit more during the lesson what this means exactly so things like well i'll let you take that away so um before we dive and you take over with teaching us all about the blocks jumper course can you tell us a bit about what exactly is blocks jumper uh so blocks jumpers uh is a mini course that we made so uh it's based on our game builder platform which we've had um [Music] probably since i think uh we've had the game builder platform where anyone can create a game and share it and remix it we've had it i think since 2015 but for many years it was it used text-based coding so about i think maybe nine months ago we also added the option to create games using block based coding we wanted um to have this platform available to more coders encoders who are also more uh more familiar with block based coding and um we didn't wanted to just uh put it out there and let everyone figure out about their own so we made this mini course that walks you through uh some of the basics of block building games in the game builder platform uh shoot with blocks so this is a small course that we released also as part of the hour of code week and uh yeah we hope many kids will give it a try two and we have um we've been we're featured on the code.org page for this block jumper course so be sure to check it out there or you can check it out we'll throw in the links for how you can connect with this block jumpers course um ido and i talked a bit offline about this and i'm i work at code monkey so i know a bit about this but we wanted so he talked about why they created the block jumper course but i just wanted to briefly mention that usually when a course is being created you have to do some kind of storyboarding or kind of figuring out kind of how the course is created itself so ido will sit down with his content developer and his team and the product um product manager of this and they'll kind of come up with where do they want it to go and what types of concepts will happen for each of the challenge so it doesn't look exactly like this right here but that's usually the process is that correct uh yeah that's right we usually go in this type of courses or like any course we like figure out what do we want the student to be able to make or learn by the end [Music] and then we try to like uh uh see like like kind of like chop up things that aren't necessary like okay like this game would be cool with x y and z but i know z isn't uh important enough and it's complicated so we chop it down to like a simple version and then we walk backwards and say okay this is um this is going to be like the linear path where you're going to advance a little bit uh exercise after exercise until you reach the final goal which i think is great insight as teachers that's what we do also regularly when we're trying we want to see what the students need to know we work backwards that way and so i think it's really neat to see how those kind of two tie together um so now we are going to get coding which everyone's been waiting for this moment so now i'm going to let it dough take over and he's going to introduce this block jumper course and do this with you so feel free to pop those questions still in the chat box okay so um i'm not seeing the chat selena if you see like a good question then feel free to uh let me know and i'll stop and answer it so it won't just be me talking for 30 minutes okay also if you have any questions go ahead okay um okay so the blocks jumper mini course this course is split into exercises so 10 exercises and by the end of course we're going to have a game that looks kind of like this gif here um is it gift for jiff how do you pronounce that um i think it i'm not the best person just to say what that is because i can never say it so i just know that in the chat box how do you pronounce that yeah tell us how you guys pronounce that image there okay um so the game builder platform is everything uh here you see the game area and different configurations and the code that you write and on the left we have instructions for um that we follow and that we will end up with a small game all right let's read in this mini course we'll create a game where the player steps or clicks the screen to make a monkey jump over gaps until it reaches a star the step block makes a spike move in this example it makes the monkey move the number in the step block defines how far the sprite moves so this is a code example and we're going to write some code here under the monkey tab so the monkey is one of the sprites we have in this game where sprites are just these objects that have an image so right now we see we have two sprites monkey and a star so let's stay on the monkey and see what we need to do drag a step block from the movement library connect it to the unrun block so i see i already have an unrun block it's always going to be here i'm going to find the movement library i'm going to drag step and connect it so remember when i said block based closing can be a little easier than text with text-based coding so if i don't connect it i see this this doesn't make any sense a step on its own is not something the computer can understand and know what to do with but when it's connected you can see it has a nice color and i see okay i wrote a valid program let's check that this is okay yep this is okay change one to 300 in the step block okay i'm gonna use my keyboard to type three zero zero click on run and see if the monkey which is the star okay i have the run button here okay i did it when you go from 1 to 300 what is the difference between that is it moving how do we know how far obviously note moves to 300 but what does that mean that's a great question so um you can say it's pixels but um if you want to know how much it is you can see when i have my cursor over the game area i can see that these numbers on the side so and i we use these uh these position numbers in a bunch of places in the game builder right now i see uh the monkey is around has its x value at around uh 50 and x is uh the horizontal axis so if i move my cursor to the right i see the x value changing and if i go to like let's say this is 50 this is 350 so i guess 300 is this area um yeah okay so it's moving it's moving it's using the xy coordinates to move and so when you move one it's just moving one little coordinate to the right and when you move 300 it's moving on the number line 300. yeah so 300 in this case is half half the screen at the gain stream um okay so we did something very simple but let's get into real coding a loop block repeats the blocks inside it for as long as the game runs for example on run loop step one this plot makes the sprite step to the right over and over again until the game is over um okay let's do this dragon loop block from the control library so the control library and drag a loop block okay and do that correctly drag a step block from the movement library place it inside of the loop block click on run and see if the monkey which is a star okay that worked that looks kind of the same but it's different before that we had step 300 and that did something once now we have a program that does something well you could say forever nothing is forever but in coding that's why his legs are still moving forever that's why his legs are still moving yeah that's right before that he eventually the monkey eventually stopped like 300 is a large number but it's ends sometimes but a loop is forever in programming terms okay now we collide so this uh games need something need some stuff to happen to with them like the different objects interact so i'm going to talk a little bit about interaction between objects in the game um the uncollide block is called when two sprites collide the argument defines the other sprite in the collision so what is other sprite actually when i'm here at the stars code on collide refers to the star so it's telling the program or the computer when the star collides with so the other sprite is the monkey so it's uh when you're coding always notice [Music] and coding in the game will always notice what is the context you're writing your code in because it's different between whether you're writing inside the monkeys code or the stars code or any other sprites code uh okay sounds are added to the game from the sound stat the play sound [Music] block plays the sound the destroy block deletes the sprite from the game add a sound by clicking on the green plus button name it twin so this was open here i'm going to choose a sound that sounds like winning okay this is pretty good i'm going to name it use my keyboard to type in win let's solve this exercise now let's do something with this sound choose the star sprite from this sprites tab okay i'm at the star sprite drag a play sound block from the game and sounds library place it inside the uncollide block play sound okay drag a destroy block from the display library place it inside the uncollide block okay so display and we want the destroy so let's read the code we worked here i'm in the stars tab so star when you collide with the monkey i want you to start to play the sound when and i want you to well be destroyed uh sorry star um okay let's see this this is working okay so the star is our goal and when we reach it we want it to be removed from the game actually destroyed uh click on run and see if the monkey reaches the star listen to the sound played and notice the star is no longer in the game after the monkey collides with it [Music] okay it worked it played the the sound i chose and the star is no longer in the game it was destroyed um and beside being no longer in the game that nothing that is inside its code here is gonna like stuff like uncollide it's not gonna happen again because something that's not in the game cannot collide with anything else either so if you have multiple stars then in each star they would need to have an on slide in each one individually yes that is correct japan uh okay that's that's price sprites are added from the sprites tab by clicking on the green plus button choosing an image clicking on the add button sprites properties can be updated from the settings icon properties include position x and y so we talked about that a little bit before affected by gravity and immovable so i'm gonna do a little demonstration about these two but first let's add a sprite so in the actual game builder platform there are many more sprites to choose from but because we're building this very specific game we want you to stay focused so we only give you these two sprites that you're gonna use okay i added the star i'm going to change the stars x value to 500. so i could drag it around but i can also go into the settings and [Music] i have this x here i'm going to type in 500. okay now it's exactly where i want it to be uncheck the allow gravity option okay so this is something i can only do from here but that's gonna demonstrate what it actually does so if this is checked and i run the game the start falls down but if this is unchecked the star stays in place so it's actually means do i allow gravity to affect this sprite and sorry that's my dog in the background check the movable option set it from the settings item okay removable so let's demonstrate what this means when it's something is immovable things that collide with it can't move it but when something is not immovable or movable things that collide with it do affect its position and it moves around so we want it immovable okay we don't we just want it to be set in one place all the time we don't want it to move around uh drag an uncollide block from the events library okay so i have the events library and i want on collide okay that worked now when the stars is going to collide with the monkey i'm going to place it i'm going to place a face sound let's do that now we're going to place a destroy block okay so we have a little program here [Music] good if you named play sound something different than win would it be would it change anything uh let's see so right now i actually can't uh i only have one sound so i can only choose win [Music] if i had more sounds and i would choose something else it would play a different sound yeah this is another thing where block-based coding can help you out in normal coding you'd have to like remember uh what name you gave to something and in certain programming languages you'd have to remember that that something is a sound so uh block based coding kind of limits you the only thing that are relevant to your current program so you can only do win because that's the only sound you have here and if i have another sound like my sound should be able to choose a different sound that might sound different and also something to know about block based versus text spaces it's hard to make a mistake with capitalization because you don't have to worry so much about even if you spelled win wrong when you added the sound it's not going to change anything whereas if you spelled win wrong when doing text-based coding then it would mess it up is that correct yeah that is correct there's a good example of like tapping something and you read it out and it looks fine but in textbook coding gotta be really really accurate uh yeah and uh there are ways to uh improving like being accurate and as long as you uh keep at it and it becomes easier and easier uh but block speed coding kind of takes off all that uh difficulty away uh yes it's a good way to uh to learn especially if you're like new to typing so that's a big thing um okay next up from the game tab you can change some of the game's properties for example world size which sprite the camera should follow game gravity after making the game world bigger click on the drag icon in top right corner so this right here to scroll and move around the game screen click on the arrow icon to switch back tiles can be used to draw the game world so right now you can see the monkey's standing on bricks so each small brick is a tile [Music] this is like a game a game design term uh click on the paintbrush to add tiles or click on the eraser to delete them okay so let's try it out change the world's width to 1200 so i have this option here world width okay so now the world where the monk this monkey lives in is a little bigger click and run and notice the monkey disappears after walking across the stream let's see that okay i no longer see the monkey you can stop so that's a good uh that will explain a good distinction between um the game world and the game screen where you can like what part of the game world you can actually see so sometimes like many games many things can happen and you just don't see them but they in the game will they happen so we want to keep following the monkey so let's uh set the camera target to monkey so we have another setting here okay that worked you see this little camera icon icon now above the monkey sprite and click run again okay so right now the camera moves along and follows uh the monkey and you can see that before the games game's world's width was 600 and now it's double that so but eventually it ends so now the monkey reached 1200 and can no longer step beyond the dimensions of the world in its little game let's click stop uh okay drag the game to see the rest of the game area okay i know how to do this add tiles to make a path to the star so we do want to reach the star so let's do this uh click on the paint brush to add tiles click on the desired tile and then click on the game screen to edit click on the eraser to delete tiles so after i choose the paintbrush i can choose which kind of tile i'm going to place i can put a few different kinds and make a colorful bridge click and run and see that the monkey which is the star [Music] all right that worked this one will be our last challenge before we take some time for q a somebody did ask this question and i hope that maybe you can be able to answer it so these blocks do have their own language is it based on something specific when you create these blocks is it something like blockly what what language are the blocks uh so blockly is uh ev is all the user interface so luckily uh we didn't uh build the user interface from scratch we use buckley which is a uh open source program what happens under the hood well there are many things that happen under the hood but eventually it does translate uh the code in blockly uh to uh coffeescript which is our the the language the text-based coding language that we normally use or traditionally have used in a game builder so like we had something that worked with text-based coding so we made like an extra layer over that of blocks and then these blocks turn into a coffee script and we had that working already so that's a little like a fun fact it works under the hood and that's uh and that's something that happens a lot in coding and computer science if you have uh something that works and you want to make so you can use it in different ways uh and you can expand upon it and you have a a big problem you can break down the smaller problems and use the solutions that you already have for multiple things so uh yeah that's a good question okay so uh less exercise from me but uh there are more fun exercises up ahead and uh after a few short ones uh there's a small game that you can play uh so let's do this one uh set speed block changes the sprite speed one is the default speed and number larger than one is faster and number between zero and one is slower here's a little coding example on run set speed to 1.4 and this is again an example of like set whose speed so you need to look at the context you're writing the coding the code in so if we're going to write set speed inside the monkeys code area it's going to set the monkey speed drag a set speed block from the movement library connect it to the unrun block there is it it's all the way over here what do we call those at the bottom these um like where it says movement and events are those called libraries yeah we call them libraries okay um the block must be before the loop block if it was after the loop block actually it can't be but loop happens forever so we want this to happen sometimes you don't want to happen after forever which is never uh so we're going to place it before the loop block change 1 to 0.5 i'm going to use my keyboard again type in that's right click on run let's see if the monkey moves really slow okay it is walking slowly i'm gonna make him uh step a little bit faster let's see okay [Music] okay that worked and that's uh an important part of game development get game development finding out like what's the right uh speed and what's the right uh speed and height so it's uh not always about the algorithm but about the different small numbers that make up the game fun so earlier you mentioned about why we set the set speed first and not in the loop block so if the set speed was in the loop block then every time his speed would correct me if i'm wrong you're the you're the computer scientist if i put the set speed inside of the loop does that mean that every single time it goes back through the loop that it's going to increase by that much so it won't increase because set speed is like uh it means um i guess you could read this as like on a 1.4 miles per hour so if you were driving 1.4 miles per hour and i told you okay but now drive 1.4 must probably just say okay so do nothing like just keep the same speed so you can think about that as the same way so like this would happen but won't change anything because it already happened in the previous loops iteration so you won't notice anything happen but the computer will do something although it will be meaningless like uh like i would tell you change your name to lena right you would say okay sure but you could say done although yeah so yeah this question comes from a student in miss diaz's class her name is ali and she wanted to know how you know what position is x and which position is y um [Music] so this game has [Music] two dimensions if you know like games that sometimes have three dimensions this game is two dimension and i'll try to explain what that actually means um [Music] there's the horizontal axis and the vertical axis and the numbers the x numbers are referring to the horizontal axis so um [Music] let's move the monkey to the right we'll change the x value okay type in 200 you see the monkey only moves right or left doesn't move up or down but then there's the y-axis and the y-axis actually means the vertical axis and when we change numbers in the y-axis the monkey moves up or down so this is 30 and as it grows uh the monkey is uh actually lower because if you look at the cursor and try to follow like where where the cursor is and what the numbers are you can see that the small numbers are in this corner and when you move right and down both the numbers increase so i hope that uh answered the question but uh excesses are uh uh a difficult uh topic to apprehend their own sometimes yeah and they look just like when you're doing math and you're doing coordinates and you're trying to find where the x y coordinate is that's exactly how this is set up but you can't see it like you would on a on a regular grid but it has the same right concept but in the game builder you can uh move your cursor and you can see in the top left corner uh the values and also when you move around in the game world then it doesn't end this is all these coordinates about the game world so if your game is bigger than 600 you can see the x value is also bigger than 600. that was a great that was a great answer and a great great question ally thank you so much for sending that question along so i know we have just about eight minutes till we wrap up today's webinar so i'm gonna ask a couple of questions that actually came from our audience if you don't mind um actually during actually questions that came up while you were talking a bit about the platform so if you guys have questions about the game builder itself or anything that you do just covered feel free to top chat those in the chat box or in the q a box um a question that i'll just answer that's not directly for you ego was do you need a subscription to play the block jumper course you do not block jumper course is our hour of code course and so um there's ten challenges as you can see exercises are six of ten and so there's ten there so you guys can play that anytime on your own um so feel free to check those out as well um a next question was what coding languages do you use to build code monkey ah that's a good question so uh we use uh um we use so we use a few programming languages and the reason is um whenever you build anything on the web you have to use javascript so javascript is the only languages that the only language that browsers understand so we use javascript for everything that's happening inside the browser we also use some coffeescript sometimes which is a language that is like a sister language to javascript uh it looks like javascript looks a little bit better sometimes easier to work with and it actually ends up being javascript and that's everything that's happened inside the browser but there are many many things that happen on uh on different computers which are called servers and uh servers do stuff like um uh find your user when you log in and tell you okay we recognize you and this is uh uh your progress or this is the next course that you're working on or this is your classroom mr teacher so everything uh [Music] so everything around that can be the language called ruby and which is a a nice little language that i personally personally like also we use something that is called a framework which is a framework is kind of like this game builder where you have the code but you also have lots of little things that uh guide you along and help you to arrange your code like here when you have uh different sprites and they are arranged into different uh like uh different codes that are arranged into different sprites so the framework we use is called ruby on rails and yeah that's it i think that's great i think that's exactly what they were hoping to um hoping to to hear so i think that's great and then i know other questions were about our website so so codemonkey the platform where you do all of your coding courses is different than our website so we have two different places if that's that makes sense so our website is done by our marketing team typically and then we have our code monkey where you do all of your coding and that lives in a different kind of think about it like a different location is that correct okay so sometimes when you do the web pages themselves you don't necessarily have to be a super super strong coder the websites have a lot of things built into them now that help assist you so he does spends most of his time doing the game and developing the courses rather than spending so much time doing the website itself that's correct yeah yeah then we don't have to bother him when we need to make a few small changes um okay so you know if you don't mind i'm going to take over screen sharing go ahead all right and we have a couple more questions so you guys keep those questions coming they're really great um and we are happy to hear from you so this question comes from miss berg she teaches fourth grade at longsfield elementary she says my students love gaming and many would love the opportunity to get a job doing game development or game design what types of jobs i think i think more so around this question is what do you need to have or what kinds of coding skills should you have to get a job in gaming um so that's a good question [Music] i guess uh game development actually has um many aspects to it so uh probably so there are many um jobs in like in uh game development they don't require actually don't require coding like uh you have illustrators and you have sound designers and you have uh uh like game designers like uh people who just um work on uh uh how the game feels or uh like where our things are uh in the game um but definitely a major part of every uh game development team would be the game developers um uh yes which who are uh mostly coders um yeah though uh it's uh i guess game development is like a very it's like its own niche in computer programming and uh if someone like knows they're really into that then it's like a direction encoding that uh you should you can start learning more seriously uh pretty early on in your uh like uh programming education um because if i mentioned like uh web development which is uh what i mostly do which is dealing like with databases and like server architecture managing uh information and stuff like that then many of these things aren't very relevant for game development which is like a different kind of coding it all has the basic uh like everyone has to learn and that's what we do in code monkey also i believe if you're a designer and if you're working a field that's adjacent uh to technology uh you gotta understand what a loop is and what uh uh what this program is what a condition is uh [Music] yeah but uh beyond that like um game development programming is pretty different than uh like other types of programming really really complex and i think i think what ego broke down was was really great is that he does a lot of like web development you do see game design there is game piece you know game design pieces but it's not as even his team has a lot of things that they have the content developer which if you watch monday's webinar um she creates the content so what's going to go into the challenges how does she want them to be solved then the team has the challenges that they create and code on the backend and then we also have a person who does like the graphics so who's actually designing or animating the course as it goes through so even just in our web-based version of the game design it's pretty complex itself too but you can start taking things and start doing things like our block jumper and our game builder courses and see if you like those and then start pursuing pathways that way yeah that's uh i think that's what's nice about the game builder uh you can really has a low level of entry and you can do some drawing do some uh i guess choose uh sounds and do some a little bit of programming and uh um yeah i guess you're gonna be uh pulled in whatever direction that uh fascinates you the most exactly um the next question here we have from miss blackfold excuse me if i didn't pronounce that correctly um fourth grade at wham um what inspired you to create this program um so if you're talking about the uh this blocks jumper i could answer about uh box jumper yeah uh yeah so in box jumper we as i mentioned uh uh before uh we wanted to have uh wanted to bring a game builder to more kids so we have this uh discover platform where we see like these amazing uh creation kids too on uh on the game builder and uh we wanted to expand upon that so uh we knew um many more kids will be interested in game creation if we added a blocks coding so that was the motivation for adding uh blocks to the game builder and then we wanted to accompany the accompany that with this uh course just to demonstrate like what you can do and lead you through creating like this very small game um yeah that was inspiration uh for blocks jumper um yeah we love it and we're excited that we have this addition to to it and i think that i learned a lot so i hope that the students and teachers learned a lot from you when you were leading that as well um so this comes from miss lewis she teaches sixth seventh and eighth grade and sorry miss lewis i'm not sure where you're joining us from but um why do you believe your product is better than other coding programs around i'm well i'm going to let you do answer but i'm also going to answer this question because i taught in the classroom too um what i love most about codemonkey is that i love that there are solutions and things for teachers there's really great lesson plans but what i what i believe most is that everything is very scaffolded so as you could see when ido was walking through there wasn't like you're not moving from really one really abstract concept everything is really well built and i just felt like my students got a much better grasp and understanding of the concept so i hope you also agree yeah yeah without that when we're working on uh code monkey courses um we always have like these two uh uh two things that pull us uh we want uh we want them to be fun and we want them to be pedagogical and uh coherent um yeah and uh every step of the way uh we stop and ask ourselves is this uh is this um um did we explain it uh well enough uh we second-guess ourselves and uh and did we make it uh engaging enough so uh yeah that's uh i hope uh eventually uh the students and teachers uh feel that uh effort yeah and there's a lot of passion there if you can't tell from everyone on our team it's very passionate about the work that we do so we hope that that comes through to you as well um this is going to be our we'll take one more question right after this and then we'll be closing out because we are right at our time today we also want to honor edo's time as he mentioned he's joining from israel so it's quite late there so we need to make sure we also honor his time as well as yours um this is from miss chamber she's at benwood elementary with third fourth and fifth grade what is the best advice you have for somebody that wants to have a career in cs um that's a good question i guess um [Music] i would say the best way to learn is uh uh well code monkey obviously uh if you want to pursue a career um [Music] just uh [Music] looking at stuff that you use every day and think about uh how were they made i use this app i use this uh i use email i use a chat like how would this made and can i make it myself and uh you know search it online and search for tutorials and just uh uh i don't look at stuff like okay this is uh this is i don't know chat this is too complicated and uh it's a mystery no everything was uh built by uh human beings and uh and be uh with that attitude uh that curious uh attitude and i just try to build stuff yourself and uh you learn along the way i think that's i think that's great feedback because we had a couple of questions about what types of education do you have to become a computer scientist but i think i think that what you're saying is that there's lots of tools that we have available to you right now without even having to go straight to college if you're younger that you can just try it out yourself right i think that's great low risk you know when you're there um okay so the last question is what advice would you give to your younger self wow that's a tough question they have some tough ones over here yeah [Laughter] i guess uh i don't know buy bitcoin or something now best when you can no just joking here uh no i'm just kidding um uh yeah but i guess uh just what i said uh now like i ended up uh um [Music] like i'm i'm pursuing the career i'm interested in and uh uh i like what i do um and i and although i showed uh we showed like uh stuff i did uh when i was younger um then [Music] like most of my teenage years i wasn't like wasn't my most uh like my strongest fashion computer science um and i think uh when you had that uh women in stem um session it was also from our other other developers um you know it's okay to uh like pursue uh what you're interested in right now and uh even like if you don't think about it as a as a long uh long-term career you know just uh be curious and uh and yeah things will work out yeah and i think i think what we can take away from all three days of our events is that just try i think that that worst thing is if you don't try something take a no thank you taste is what we like to say and i think that's that's something to kind of keep in mind with coding or any passion that you have and i think you don't mentioned you know he's really into the music scene when he was younger and different things like that but music and coding actually tie pretty well to each other with just the different skills that you have so i think doe had some amazing amazing feedback and answered your question so well and we really really appreciate both his time and your time for spending that with us today um we hope that you took something away from this hour of code event and remember that hour of code doesn't have to be just an hour and that you can really take this and we hope that you take and feel the passion that we have for computer science bringing it to your students and bring that to your students as well so again thank you so much to edo all of those people that are joining us live who will watch this later and all of you students who are taking the time to spend an hour of code with us we thank you so much and as always don't forget to write code catch bananas and save the world we'll see you guys later bye everybody