CodeMonkey Coding Platform Review | 2021 End of School Year Webinar

and hello everybody and thank you so much for joining us for today we are gonna go ahead and get started and anyone who just joined us if you could just tell us where you're joining us from um we're very excited to get started all right um so today is our end of product overview webinar so we just want to thank you so much for joining us and we really just wanted to take the time to summarize another great year with code monkey we want to share with you some product sorry we want to share some product enhancements and new features that will make your life easier and hopefully a little bit more enjoyable while using code monkey we'll do our best to answer any live tweets during today's webinar please remember to also share in the chat box or in the q a all and if we don't answer your questions immediately we will make sure to get to them today during today's q a so if we don't answer you right away and you pop that question in the q a box we will answer it we do have some time for q a at the end today and if we don't then we'll make sure that we follow up with you via email following today's webinar a survey will pop up and once you take the survey professional development certificate will be emailed to you for your time today so let's go ahead and let's get ready to write code catch bananas and today we're gonna spread the word so be sure to if you aren't already follow us on all of our social media platforms we have facebook twitter instagram linkedin or you can also join our facebook pln group so this is a group that we started this past year and in the group we share teaching tips and just any if we have any new features or anything like that we do have um the place and space for you to speak about that so now we're going to go ahead and we're going to introduce ourselves to you and who you'll be spending your time with today so my name is lina soleil if you haven't met me before i am the professional development and sales manager here at code monkey i spent about 10 years in the classroom and doing different things in that realm and i've been with code monkey now for three hi everyone my name is dor you don't see me but you can hear me i'm the customer success manager at codemonkey i'm working closely with lina and the entire team here at code monkey to make sure that code monkey is top-notch for all of you teachers and your students of course so enjoy the webinar thank you dory and it's nice to see some familiar faces here joining us today um okay so what are we going to be covering today so today we're going to go over some new content some teacher capabilities that we changed as well as some administration capabilities student facing design and like i mentioned we'll have some time at the end for q and a so some of our most recent content that we have added is we did launch this during the hour of code but we uh have our space adventure and so that's available for an hour of code and so the oops okay and so with the space adventure you are with our space monkey and you're moving him the students are working through the challenges here to get the monkey to the banana but in space using the same coffee script language that's just as familiar as coding adventure and our next oops sorry and then the next thing we're going to talk about is our new edition which is our beaver achiever challenges and we're really excited about this new addition to beaver achiever so beaver achiever used to have three courses and each one we're about 55 challenges all in and now we have 115 challenges and so here on beaver achiever in the first one we have beyond challenge 20 is when they start to really do nested loops and here you can see it's just a little bit more robust in nature so we heard feedback from you and we listened and so we added some different challenges in part two of coding adventure i mean part two of beaver achiever the beaver help we helped to build the beavers home um so in the first beginning challenges they built the walls of the house and now the students will work on building the roof and in the last one the beaver achiever has had so many responses and his business has been so busy that now he is able to have a factory and so they're working with different conditions if else and or and so just really expanding upon that knowledge of which they had gathered in the beginning in addition to that we will be um i'll be discussing a little bit more things that we'll be adding to beaver achiever so now let's talk about some of the um features that we've added for the teachers so now there is an ability to export data to a csv file so that means that you can generate a report for all of the code monkey courses and not just for coding adventure so before when you would generate a export the data to a csv you would see just specific to a specific you would see everything all at once and now you can actually specifically see everything specific to that course so when i export the data to a csv file i can actually select the course i can do a specific activity report and i can also include archive classrooms a lot of teachers were saying that some of the classrooms that they had archived they still wish that they could see the data and so now you can actually see all of the data here so when you export this to a csv file then you're able to see the usage the activity for the specific classroom for all of the data and see how much activity we know that that was a feature that was oops i see i'm not sharing um i see that that was a feature door would was i not showing the beaver achiever challenges challenges we saw yes okay good um so here in the um sorry in the export csv file you were um i mean we heard from teachers during the remote learning experience that you weren't able to see the full activity so we just wanted to make sure that you were able to see that full activity and actually be able to pull it specific to a course and have a little bit deeper dive into what it is that they were there and so dora is actually going to share a link for you in the in the chat box for you to be able to do that as well the next change that we also made here was the ability to search specifically for students so we heard you on this and so when we're in the classrooms area we know that some of you have hundreds of students and so it may be difficult to find one so you can search for a specific student and when you do you can see the specific classroom and you can actually go you can see their display name their username and you can go actually to the specific classroom it'll take you direct to the classroom list which is a really great feature something that was requested by all of you to be able to quickly search for those students and have that easier capability okay then another change that we made here was the student activity dashboard and in the student activity dashboard so prior to that we had the progress page which we all know and love and we actually added a little bit more additions here now when you click on a specific student you are able to see the full student activity so you can see how many solutions how many courses how many games and challenges they created and their specific proficiency so in the classroom in the grid book you can see the full classroom proficiency table but here you can see it's specific to students so you can see how active they were in the past seven days as well as their course progress you can easily navigate between the courses and see how far and how much they've completed you can also up here you can also toggle between the students so you can see how much time people were spending on the course and how much how many challenges they've seen so just an easier way to navigate between each of those in addition to the student activity this is something that we did add um last year and we shared about it in some of our office hours but we wanted to make sure that you were able to do this before i mean to understand this new feature as well so previously when you would be in the my classrooms page was the only way that you would be able to previously navigate between the courses now once you have a class and you're inside of your classroom you can navigate between the classrooms by clicking the drop down arrow and that will take you between the classrooms you can also previously you could navigate by course and now you can also navigate by classroom so that's an extra helpful thing to make hopefully your lives a little bit easier and the proficiency table which i just mentioned how do you access the proficiency table well when you are in the gradebook itself so you can see now in the progress page the specific proficiency table for that student but to see the proficiency table for your whole classroom you would go into the gradebook and up here at the top there's a little tab here and you click on proficiency and that's going to give you the proficiency for all of your students and that's going to be able to cover all of the topics that's going to cover all of the topics that are covered without throughout coding adventures so here you can see all of the concepts that are covered throughout all the code monkey courses and how proficient each of the students are so the more that they work throughout the platform the more proficient they become in each of these concepts and last but not least this is in addition to the new student activity dashboard this part is probably one of my favorites and ones that i love to share with teachers is in the courses so i'm in the classroom page itself and now i click on the courses tab and here we have all of the courses that are available to you if something is not it will be grayed out and you'll know pretty easily here um but what's really great about this is the tiling that the students see just keep in mind the students oh they see this this banner here at the top they don't see the specific grade levels or anything when you're on the course page but it tells you which specific grades it's best for that does not mean that any of the courses something to keep in mind about code monkey courses is that they can be utilized for many different grade levels these are the suggested ones so if you have a student who's a struggling coder i know that one of our teachers here on the call has used this with some of her you know special ed students she teaches middle school and the beaver achiever courses she uses for the younger one so just know that you have that available to if that's available to you that you can kind of vary and differentiate that way um but here you can see the specific grade that it's associated with how many lesson plans there are and what device it's best used on or what device it's available on so you'll see here when we get to the more text based courses that it's only web-based version so it's just good for you to kind of have a quick overview to know okay which device can my students use for this specific course itself when you click on read more here you're able to see just a summary of what the students will be going over but what i find to be the most beneficial here is the specific coding concepts that the students will be working on so you can say you know you're setting your planning for this semester and you're saying okay my students are going to get to for loops and i know this because they're going to finish part one of coding adventure then when you click on the specific standards here this is going to take you specific to the standards that we have these are associated with the csta and common core standards and it's going to give you an overview of the specific standards that are available for that specific course if you need something more robust than that you can just ask a member of our team and we'll give you a more customized report for you and then you can also access the lesson plans here so how cool is it that you don't really have to leave this screen specifically um and you're navigating right here and have access to those lesson plans so we hope that those features on the teacher side really help just make things a little bit easier when you're live in action teaching with students whether remote or in a hybrid setting or full in person as we hope to be able to do this year um so some administration capabilities um we have improved upon our clever and google integration we know that some of the google we know that google's making a few changes this summer with some of their rostering capabilities and their full integration with glover but now you can actually import multiple classrooms and so dorr is going to share this article with you here so let's go ahead and let's take a look at that so when i'm here i'm going to go back to my classrooms page so i'm going to click on the classrooms page and when i go to create a classroom here you can import from google now if i am a if i'm synced with clever it's going to say import from clevver and before you used to have to i had a teacher who had 30 classrooms and so she was having to import those one by one and so now what's really great is that you can actually import all of your classrooms all at once make sure they tie it to a specific specific subscription and we do have this school optional if you do see this here you can select your school as well and then you just make sure that you're attaching these classrooms to this specific school and then once that happens then they'll just import the classrooms right here for you so it makes your it makes your life a little bit easier and so you see this message because i don't have students rostered in there but once they are then it will just populate right here for you and it makes your life so much easier if you're still not using google classroom then you can still um you know just have the students join via a classroom code and then something else is this student oops sorry the student um the student bulk actions archive so let's talk about that so now i'm in my uh close out some of these windows here now i am in my classrooms page here and i'm going to go to one of my classrooms so i'll go to my classroom here and then when i go to the students tab here i can actually select this and i can archive the classroom entirely right here i can also move students so let's say this teacher this specific student here i want to move the student i can move the student to a specific classroom right here on the same page so it makes it a little bit easier you can also move them right here but this bulk action makes it a little bit easier for you as well so you can archive and move them now let's talk about what else we've so we've talked about the teacher side we've talked about some administration side let's go ahead and talk about the student facing design so we are going to go through all of these here saving draft solutions the coding adventure visualizations and then we just talked about the course page progress assign and unassigned so let's talk about the draft solution so previously in any of the courses themselves when you would be in a course the student would be working on a solution and the end of the class would happen and the solution would not be saved and so unless they had submitted it prior to that so now when you're working on a specific challenge within a course and the student is unable to finish it so let's go to a challenge that i haven't done here and i just have a step here and i have my solution here once i leave from this challenge so let's i go to a different different challenge i'm able i'm able to return back to this and it's able to save my draft solution so it will show a banner at the top and it will say show draft solution so just something that makes it a little bit easier for students and it causes a little less frustration when they come back to it and they've been working on something and the time is is done so you can see here it says should you have a draft solution so now i can show the draft from what i had previously now in coding inventor itself previously in variables variables is always a tricky thing for students to kind of grasp whether they're working in a math classroom or specifically when they're doing some programming themselves so we have introduced this visualization and so before we know that a variable stands for something and we could see the monkey running but now we specifically can see here at the bottom you'll see we see what the starting variable value is and now the students can actually see the value changing this is true for in challenge 80 plus when they get to defining functions they're able to actually see where specifically is the monkey going so i'll show you this as well so it's nice for the students to see not only the additive pattern working but also to see what the value of the variable and how the variable is changing itself when i go to challenge 80 which is when they get really introduced to functions themselves we'll see here we have defined functions and so we have this well what does go to mean a lot of times students don't really understand this concept of defining functions and so now we can see that a is representing the bridge it's representing the match it's whatever object the the rat is actually running to there so it's nice it's just a extra feature for the students to really understand those more abstract concepts and then we just talked about the course page itself okay so now let's talk about some i guess i'll pause and see if there's been any questions are students able to see their dashboard check their skills etc currently i see that this question has been answered it's only for the students students cannot see their own dashboard but that's something we're definitely open to bringing to the team and sharing their suggestions with your suggestions with our team okay so now let's talk about some news and notes so the block based game builder i'm going to show you this here in just a second it is open right now for beta version right now it's just open to kind of test but the full launch with lesson plans and things will be available in the fall for you with the return of school and that'll just be added right to your subscription that you already have um we're also going to be adding bieber achiever lesson plans we know that the lesson plan there are lesson plans there right now but they will follow the same structure as all of the other lesson plans that we have throughout all of coding all of the code monkey courses and so we'll have that for all 115 challenges and some extension activities which are going to be really fun related to the block based game builder and then at the end of this month on the 28th we will be having an ambassador-led webinar and so the teachers will be discussing about building collaboration whether in a classroom setting or in a hybrid model and just have best practices for that and what it looks like using using the code monkey platform so now let's take a look at our game builder platform and how do you even get there so to get to the game builder block based course you'll go into the courses itself and right now when you go to create a game you will click start coding and right here it says select a coding language and so you can either select the text base which we've been used to or you can select block base and when you do you have those same sort of functionality the same templates that we've had in previous years and then when you click on select it will take you here remember this is still the beta version and isn't the final release yet but will be finally released so we do have pretty much most things here will stay remotely the same it looks exactly like the game builder did previously where you have the text editor in the center on the right hand side you have the stage and where you can add the widgets and the sounds and all of that good stuff and then over here on the left-hand side in the text-based version they run along the bottom and you're able to see the text itself but instead here when i click on movement i can first i need to add a sprite so when i add my sprite here when i click run what do i want to have happen i want him to step one and so you can change change the value there so just a little bit easier easier functionality for when the students are working sometimes the tech space can be a little bit tricky so this is a little bit more differentiation and we'll hopefully make it we're just really excited about this and we think the students are going to be excited about it too so you have the different widgets here and you have the different game sounds and logic and so everything ties to what it is that they're doing with the sprites and the widgets and the sounds and those types of things are all available here like you would add them and then you have those variabilities there so now we really want to we really wanted to go over the new features and things that we have coming up for the fall and to share some of the product updates and things that we've made changes from your feedback this year so we wanted to take some time and see if you have any q a any questions that we can hopefully answer and then we are going to share a survey with you here in just a minute in addition to the webinar survey itself um but just about some feedback and some different things that we hope that we know you're probably looking for door have you seen any questions come through no so there was only the one that okay all right if anyone wanna if anyone wanna unmute himself and uh ask a question please yes you can raise your hand there and then we will allow you to chat with us can i share what the students see sure let me just pause share my screen here and then go to a student view okay so here i am logged in as a student this student is um this student has all of the courses assigned to them um as most of the courses assigned to them as it was put as this is part of a teacher training workshop but when the students oh something i forgot to mention is now at the top of the screen here when the students log in they're able to see the current course that they're working on and how much progress there has been that's something i forgot to mention earlier and so they can see that there and then all of the courses that have been assigned to the teacher signed by your teacher you can see them up here and anything that they don't have access to is down here below so they're able to see that these are ones that they are not able to see now a question comes in a lot of times is why do i see that i've assigned both of the banana tails but part two is locked so part two is locked because they need to finish part one prior to getting to part two this is the same thing with the beaver achiever or coding adventure so if you assign all three coding adventure courses they will only be able to access them as they complete the challenges and and get there so if you assign part three of beaver achiever but they haven't done part one or part two it is something that they will need to do prior in order to access that course so that's just something to keep in mind as you're kind of working there um and so this is what the students will see they'll see the they'll see where they are progress wise and they're able to continue where they last less last left off their creations are located here so they're able to see their specific games and challenges that they've created as well as the games and challenges that have been created for the classroom and so they're able to see those right here and then the discover remember as a teacher you could turn that on or off and that's in the i can show you where that's located um and you can turn these games and challenges on or off if you turn it off so i will do this by going to the showroom in my classroom page so i'm all my classrooms i just want to show you this briefly i go to my classrooms and i'm in the showroom here and i can just disable the discover and so when i disable discover now let me re-share here this other window of the student and now when we're on the student page you can see that the discover has got away so they're only able to see their courses and their creations and articles in the help center so they are able to see those coding concepts pulling those coding concepts from coding adventure and there's also banana tails um coding concepts as well and so they're right here for the students to access they can access the articles within the help center so i hope that helped to answer your question will we be able to generate individual reports um at this time we don't have that feature something we can definitely bring back to our team but right now we don't have the ability to generate individual reports you're only able to see those reports in the classroom dashboard itself in the classroom progress page itself so i'll show you that one more time here and so you can see that banner right here at the top but if i go into my classrooms page itself and i click on the page here and then i click on the specific student i am able to see their specific progress can't unfortunately pull specific reports but in the when you export the data to a csv file you can see this a lot more robust and see this amount of solutions and different things that have been created right there for you okay so just to oops just pause here for a second so just to recap today we talked about the new content so the addition to the beaver achiever the space space adventure that's available to you as well as the new block based game builder course some of the teacher capabilities so that's being able to see individual progress generating specific csv reports specific to course or by activity and then being able to move students from classroom to classroom the new import all feature for google classroom what the students are able to see there and you know the kind of the design there for the students and then um the upcoming webinar that we do have that we do have coming at the end of this month so before we wrap up today since it seems like we've wrapped up the questions here we do have a link to our survey here and so this survey here is to gather information so some of the suggestions that you had all here might be a great place to go ahead and put that right into the survey of the suggestions that you have if you have anything specific that we didn't answer for today we hope that you and i know that door is dropping this into we're going to drop this in here for you to for the survey so the survey right there will take you to um we really appreciate you taking the time to get your to get your feedback about some things and we take we take your feedback and we bring it to the team so all the surveys that we send out anything that we do that's how we make these products that's how we make the product updates and changes and things like that based on your feedback or if we know something is really amazing we also know that from your feedback too so it's just very valuable information and we very much value you and your feedback um so um and it just lets us know any future changes and things that you would like as well so we will just want to thank you so much for taking time out of most of you are on summer break um for spending your time with us today um remember to follow us on all of our social channels for updates and news and notes and anything we've been doing um teacher chats once a month on tuesday so be sure to check out that and make sure to join us and be sure to reach out with any questions that you have we are here to help you have the best teaching experience possible while using code monkey and from our team to yours we want to thank you for all that you do today tomorrow and all the days in between to get your students future ready remember as always to write code catch bananas and save the world and we'll see you guys next time bye