I have spent some time with the new tutorials now. I like them so far. There are some bugs of course, but that wasn’t what I was tasked to look at. I have some negative impressions mixed together with positive impressions. I think the positives are more numerous. Which is saying a lot when it comes from a grumpy old man.
First, they are significantly better than the alternative which has been a long document of instructions. The kids often get lost in the long document of instructions, which ends up being a teacher problem, times a dozen.
The hints are substantial, but then in class I often give substantial hints anyway. In a given class there will be a wide range of understanding and we pretty much aim for the middle. Some of the children will not need any hints, while others cannot function without them.
The replace my code button is a reasonable solution to the problem which is that the children get lost and cannot correct course without a huge boost. This is essentially starter code. I approve of starter code and hand it out freely.
One vulnerability is saving the current project into the workspace without any protection. I did try to delete some code and lost some progress. Having done that it was hard to figure out where I was in the instructions. Perhaps protect the in progress lessons until some event like finishing them.
I am wondering if these also have lecture slides or instructor guides. With the TEALS teaching staff moving to CODE there may be no need and video lectures could be rolled into the lessons instead.
I have not tried to author a lesson yet. I need to do that next.
Thank you so much for that feedback! It was amazing!
I am working on some updates to the skillmaps now. Hopefully it will fix most of the typos, etc., but I really want to hear more about losing progress when you deleted some code. Can you elaborate? Was it a situation where you went to a previous level and lost work from a later level? I want to make sure that won’t happen with students.
To be fair I did something I should not have. Unfortunately, there is one student in every class that will do that. I deleted all of the projects created by the tutorials. There were three. Two called something like 0006 and one called copy of 0006.
What happened was the code that showed up was a previous version. I was able to hit the replace button and continue on. So not catastrophic.
If this is something you are interested in I can attempt a recreation. I can imagine testing is hard given that kids do things you would never think off.
Have I told you yet how much I hate the Arcade text input? I understand that it is like an arcade game without a keyboard. You can load a game onto one of the little Gameboy like devices and it will work.
I have yet to find one of those little Gameboy devices that will run a reasonably sized MakeCode game. If you are avoiding a keyboard because of the limited buttons on one of those devices I would say stop doing that. Those devices only support about 20 sprites which means even a simple snake game won’t run on one.
If the children are playing their games and sharing them they are doing so on smart phones, which do have keyboard input.
Probably a false alarm on the losing code part. It looks like each square of a path has code saved for it. Going back from a later step to an earlier step could make me think I lost code. I am wondering which would be the least astonishing? Showing the last thing you did for a given square/part or the last thing you did on the entire path? For me going down a path code is forwarded from square/part to the next square/part making me believe there was only one version of my code. I was then surprised to find out there are many versions.
I opened up Lab 2.1 Part 2 at the same time I had already opened up Lab 2.1 Part 4 and got a conflict. The change I had made was to collapse and format the code as shown below.
It is unclear to me how that would happen given the two squares/parts have separate code as I recently discovered.
The check marks seem to react to re-opening lab parts. I did not reset them I just clicked on the square, View Code, then on a circle in the middle of the part. That takes my check mark away.
It does still remember that I finished 2.1 because I can click the trophy and get it. I tried to refresh the page and did not get my check marks back. What I can do is click on square, Continue, click on the final step then click done to get my check marks back.
I am not sure that is something you would care about.
