2017 CodeMonkey's Hour of Code Webinar

Key Takeaways

hi everyone thank you so much for joining me today I'm so excited that you're able to take some time out of your day to hear about code monkeys hour of code so first of all my name is Zoe I'm a customer success here at code monkey and today I will be hosting this webinar if you have any questions throughout message me in the chat and hopefully I will have enough time to get through all of the questions in the end also if you missed anything this entire webinar is recorded so you will be able to see it on our blog tomorrow for those who are not as familiar with code monkey code monkey is an Israeli startup that was established in 2014 and it is a game based platform that teaches kids had a code so in the beginning definitely we started with the coding adventure that's aimed for the younger crowd ages 7 and up and recently we expanded to the older kids for example one of our activities is a Python chat bot that's aimed for a grade 6 and up so the point of this webinar will definitely expose you to all of our new activities and we'll help you decide which hour of code activity you would like to use in your classroom so an intro to hour of code for those who are less familiar is is that it was established in 2013 and by code org and it was supported by the Obama administration and it has gotten millions to code and hopefully after this hour of code we will get even more students to code and this year it's held through December 4th to 13th so I'm sure some of you guys have already started hour of code today and in recent years it's also expanded to the entire month of December so I want everyone to know that they can ask me questions in the chat at any time and I will definitely read them and if there are any technical issues I will be sure to resolve them so I'm going to share my screen so the first thing is I want you guys to try to do this by yourselves as well so I don't know about you guys but for me it really helps to catch all the information if I also do it and not just listen so go to play call it monkey calm and and click on sign up so right now what you're about to do is sign up as a teacher I'm code monkey and you're going to sign up for the free teachers trial here you will be able to access all of our code monkey activities so click on teacher and enter your information so I'm going to enter my email and my password click on yes and the next okay so I'm going to wait a second wait for you guys to get to this page again if you have any technical issues please write so in the chat and I will be sure to help you okay so I'm going to enter a school name I'm going to enter the name of the school that I went to and its website okay so now you have to confirm your email so I will confirm my email and sticking it to great so I just clicked on confirm my email address and now I can get coded okay lower the volume here okay I'm going to wait just one second and make sure that everyone is up to par let me know in the chat if you have any technical issues okay amazing let me access out okay so now I am in the home page and I'm going to choose an avatar I'm going to choose this younger lady okay so note hold on just cuz that was in the way okay so note that you have your classroom it's automatically created so click on your classroom and it will take you to your teachers dashboard so this free teachers trial is limited to 30 students if you have more than 30 students for your hour of code feel free to create another teacher account and it is limited to up to 30 days so you're good for the month of December and it will include the four hour of code activities that we are introducing specifically for hour of code code monkey you could find them in the courses tab and you will see here that you have four different activities that you can use the first one is the coding adventure second one is the game builder then there's the hour of code the Python Chapa and then lastly dodo does math I will go into more information on each of these activities later on I just want to point to your attention the revoke option so if you don't want your children your students to be able to play all of the activities because you want to focus on just one you can revoke the other activities and now your students can only access the coding adventure so here you see that you have zero students the group is empty so click on add students there are three different ways to add students the first is a create a signal account so here what you can do is enter the full name of every single one of your students and assign them a username and password this is great if you have under ten students more than that you do want to look into a bulk upload or share class code so both these are great for a lot of students the bulk upload does require a CSV file and you also need to pay attention not to include a header row in the CSV file the third is the share class code I recommend this if you do not have a CSV file of all of your students and you want to give them the freedom to create their own username and passwords so the way that your students can log in through this class code is by you copying or writing this code on a whiteboard or blackboard and tell your students to go to play coedmonkey.com again for those who are just joining us now I am showing everyone how to add students to your classroom then tell your students to click on sign up and remember how you chose the teacher option tell your students to choose the student option and then click yes I have a classroom code paste your code and click on enter now your students will be able to add let's just do student 1 1 2 3 add their in information save their information click on I save my information let's play save password and they will be automatically taken to code monkeys coding adventure in the meantime they will add it to your classroom okay so after you set up your students you would go to your courses and here you will see the four different options so for those who are less familiar with code monkey our coding adventure is our very first course and it's the basic it teaches kids as young as eight years old real cold real text based code and it does so with a fun monkey that needs to catch the bananas and in order to do so you need the students need a right code for example the number of steps the monkey needs to take to reach the bananas this is a really fun and interactive way to get into coding and is definitely different from all the other options out there especially because it not only teaches computational thinking but it does so in a really engaging way and teaches real code from the first challenge the second option is the game builder now this we recommend from ages 6 up grade 6 and up so mainly 11 12 year olds and and up and the beauty about this product is kids create their own games so as opposed to the coding adventure where you're just learning the first the foundation of code and the language with game built builder you're able to go from a consumer to a creator and make your own content so this hour of code activity leads the students step-by-step to create a specific game but they are coding this game now for our exciting new courses we have our chat BOTS and our dota those math courses so our choppa our pipes our chat BOTS specifically is our very new course and it's being featured for the very first time during this hour of code so I'm really excited for you to try it out and is basically a game where you and your students are able to code a chatbot and do so in the language of Python it's great for ages 14 plus or sixth grade and up basically the beauty of this is that you're learning Python so as opposed to in the coding adventure where we're teaching CoffeeScript which is a mix of JavaScript and Python it's like JavaScript in a sense that it's multifunctional you can build web applications websites games etc it's as easy to understand as Python so it's really a great middle but Python is a better a more well-known coding language so that's why it is also an amazing course to try out so the fourth activity is a coding and math course called dojo does math so in this activity students are able to practice math skills such as distances angles and measurements by using basic code so this is really great for teachers who want to implement some kind of hour of code activity but don't have the time and of course this is for a certain age group it's for ages 7 to 11 or third to fifth grade and it does align with the Common Core math standards so it's definitely very functional in that sense and it's really fun their students will meet our newest character our dodo so I'm going to now demonstrate the coding adventure so as a teacher what you can do I'm going back to the home page you can click on the activity and start coding the beauty of being a teacher is you can also jump around from challenge to challenge this means that if you don't have time you can definitely get a feel for every single one of our activities and not not worry about having to just start from the very beginning so notice here in the very first challenge that it's very intuitive here you have a keyboard and an arrow and it just grabs your attention right away to step 10 so this right side of the screen is where the real code happens meanwhile on the left side of the screen you will see the main stage where everything that happens that's written in the text affects the monkey and the main stage so let's click on run and see what happens so here's one of our adaptive hints could keep on trying and get a feel for this this definitely a very intuitive course and game I know that this has been around for quite some time I do want to show you guys a little bit more of of the teachers dashboard and tools that you can use to implement this game in the most successful way possible and then I will go into the other newer courses so what I do want to show you here is in I'm going back to the classroom in the teachers dashboard you could click on the progress tab and here you will be able to see all of the challenges available and as well as the solutions to the challenges so hold on I'm going back to a challenge that is part of the hour of cone so I clicked again for those who missed it I clicked on the number these numbers on the top row they do correlate with the challenge that they represent so I am clicking on challenge 20 to get a three star solution so I do recommend the pair programming system so definitely have your students try to help each other before sharing a solution this is a last resort but it's definitely good for you as a teacher to have as a safeguard so I do want to go into a little bit about the Stars and the grading system so because this is a brand-new student there is no progress but what you can see here is that there's a greeting a three star grading solution so the first star is acquired by by students if they solved the challenge and they got all of the bananas on the screen the second star is given if they solved all of the bananas and they did so in the most concise I'm sorry in the in the way that acquires that arm uses previously learned topics and the third one is as I was chart starting to say before is if they caught all the bananas use previously learned concepts and did so in the most concise short to the point way possible so this is nice you can see here the the progress tab and the answers for all of our courses so you don't have to worry and I will go into our dojo does math and this is a very handy so now I just assign it to the class so I'm going back into the main page and I'm clicking on the interesting okay so I will click on that's so weird I'm looking right now for the dollar that's math and I cannot see it on the activities so what I will do is I will just go with the chap course and I will later fix this issue so what you do is you click on start coding and the best way to implement this into the classroom is by telling your kids to just Google call it monkey and click on the very first website that appears so this is an easy way for them to access the game and once they're there they will be able to go to the course so this is our Python chat course and what you see here on the left side of the screen are the instructions and they're so important to read it is overwhelming to have all of these instructions but a lot of times you will be able to also see a hint a very helpful hint at the bottom so we know a lot of students don't like to read instructions or follow instructions so what they will end up realizing is that through reading the instructions they will actually be able to solve a challenge as opposed to just skipping ahead and and just playing around with the buttons so I would definitely it's a great way to really implement reading instructions in the classroom so meet code monkeys trivia chat bot welcome to Python Chapa in this course you will learn how to create your own trivia Chapa this means that by the end of the 16 exercises your students will have coded their own Chapa that asks trivia questions random like what kind of sports do you like and they will be learning Python simultaneously so I definitely recommend this for the older ages so that is everything for today thank you so much for joining this webinar on how to host an hour of code with code monkey if you enjoyed it then like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at code monkey st you feel free to tag us at pictures as you host hour of code with code monkey in your classroom thank you so much and have an amazing week