Hi everybody,
I hope you all enjoyed the half-term holiday if you had one!
It’s been quite a while since I last posted an update on the blog. As always, I’ve been busy working behind the scenes, and I’m sure many of you have already noticed some of the changes and new features appearing across the site. There have been quite a few updates recently, so I wanted to put together a quick summary of what’s been added.
Before I get into this though, just a quick mention that I will be at the ‘Festival Of Computing’ on the 1st July! Please come over and say hi if you see me.
If you haven’t got a ticket yet you can get one here: Festival of Computing – Craig ‘n’ Dave
New Error Diagnostics
You may have noticed that the code linter has been a little temperamental recently! This is largely due to some of the limitations of the system I originally put in place during the early stages of the site’s development.
One of my long-term goals has always been to expand the range of programming languages supported by the platform. Since the current linting system has started to show its weaknesses, it felt like the right time to address those issues while also laying the foundations for future development.
This weekend, I will be rolling out a major update to the linter. Instead of relying on the browser-based approach currently in use, error checking will now be handled by a server-side linter. While that may not mean much from a user’s perspective right away, it should result in more accurate and reliable error diagnostics.
More importantly, this change opens the door to a range of future improvements. With a server-side system in place, I can begin building additional functionality that simply wasn’t possible before. Over time, this should make it much easier to add support for more programming languages and introduce several highly requested features that require server-side processing.
During the initial rollout, error diagnostics may take slightly longer to appear than they do currently. This is intentional, as I want to carefully monitor server performance and capacity under real student usage before expanding the system further. The data gathered during this period will help me plan future improvements and ensure the platform remains reliable as new features are added.
For now, I’d really appreciate any feedback you can provide on the new IDE error highlighting once it goes live. Your comments will help me identify any issues and shape future improvements.
Recent Updates
Student Awards
Stars collected are becoming meaningful. The stars are currently used to track progress and you can track your students stars in the leader board. I know that students like competing to collect them. With this latest update, as the student progresses, they now earn stars for completing projects but also earn them for other actions on the site, or for passing certain milestones.
Students are given badges to represent their achievements so they can display their progress in a fun way and as they pass certain milestones or gain achievements, the site will provide the student with direct positive feedback so they know they are progressing.
Teachers are also able to recognise their students efforts with special badges. These badges can be given to students at the teachers discretion along with bonus stars if the teacher wants to reward the student further!
Student Avatars
Students will be able to spend their stars customising their avatar in the avatar shop. This is currently in development and I am having the art for these new avatars developed by my wonderful daughter! Students can see a little preview of the shop if they click on their settings. There is nothing to use your stars on currently, but there will be options coming and in place for the new school year!
Linear Assignments and Assessment Improvements
It is now possible when setting an assignment to a class to set the assignment to only allow linear access to projects inside the assignment. This means that the next project in an assignment will only unlock and be accessible if the previous one was completed. Switch the toggle in the class assignment to enable it.
You can also highlight an assignment as an assessment. Currently this option just highlights the project as an assignment and disables access to the support tools that might have been enabled. In time this will allow me to add additional features to support assessments further such as time gated access etc.
Custom Project and Assignment Management – Archiving
As your library of custom projects and assignments grows or the number of assignments you set to a class grows, you may find you reach a point where you want to remove some items from your main view but don’t want to delete them altogether.
The new ‘archive’ option allows you to keep old projects and assignments but have them removed from the main view.
You will see this in multiple places – Custom project and assignment management and in the class assignment screen.
Once students have completed work on any assignment or project, deleting that project or assignment will delete the associated work. Now, rather than deletion, you can choose to archive the projects and assignments, meaning all work will remain intact and saved until you are ready to fully delete.
Now when choosing to delete a project/assignment you will be asked if you want to archive it instead.
Project Collections
To help organise custom projects even more, you can now place or organise your custom projects into ‘collections’. For some of you who have built a growing library of projects to use for different reasons, you can already add tags and topics to filter them by. However, with the addition of the collections you can now sub divide them into separate folder collections that will allow you to group projects in other meaningful ways.
For example you may want to group all projects for your year 8 python course in a collection to make it easier to find what you are looking for.
Simply create a collection and drag and drop into the collection itself. Clicking on the collection in the menu will take you to the projects stored in it.
I will look to bring a similar approach to assignments at some point in the future but hopefully this helps with organising templates as your courses grow.
Note: You can only organise your own projects into folders – the built in Go Code It and Time 2 Code projects cannot currently be organised in this way.
New Edexcel course
You may have noticed that I added a small example of the upcoming Edexcel GCSE course. There will be more getting added to this in due time but this gives you an idea of the direction of travel for this particular course.
If there is anything you’d like to see in that course let me know.
More to come
I continue to work to build out the site and thinking back to when the site first started nearly 3 years ago, it has transformed into something so much larger than I ever expected….and I have so much more that I want to do.
The list above covers the main changes that have been completed recently but there are so many more minor changes that have been put in place in response to your feedback and as always I thank you for your continued support.
More to come soon but in the meantime….have great summer term!
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