Community reviews for Code.org

I like that it is self paced and guided practice. Most students should be able to complete the hour of code with little assistance from a teacher. There is also tons of information for extension activities and additional resources.

This is a great way to have students learn about computer programming. There are many different options for coding games. My students really enjoyed the angry birds game (Just make sure they have headphones or else you will go crazy). The levels got progressively harder but the students loved the challenge. As a teaching tool it was great to show the kids how computer programs worked. It is also useful to show sequencing and can be used for English reinforcement, math skills, etc. The only real issue was the sound of 37 student computers playing angry birds all day long.

A great visual explanation of programming concepts required for games and apps. The teacher interface shows student progress and attempts, successes and failures. Contains videos from industry leaders such as Bill Gates. Videos contain a fair mix of male and female industry leaders. The teacher interface is somewhat hokey. Student usernames are on one screen, password resets are on another. If a student has a very long username it is hard to figure out what it is. Solution: students should create accounts with a uniform username such as firstname_class#_school.

Code.org is a great place to start teaching students to code. The Angry Birds and Flappy Birds lessons have video introductions with pop-up windows providing prompts and troubleshooting advice to students as they work their way through the self-paced, sequential modules. Teachers do not need to have experience with coding to use Code.org. If you follow along the lessons with your students, you will learn as well. Code.org partners with other organizations and websites, so you will find links to other learning modules from Scratch, Khan Academy, Tynker, LightBot, and more. There is something here for all students from 2nd grade through adult. There is more comprehensive lessons available to teachers beyond the Hour of Code curriculum. If you register as a teacher, you can sign up your class and work them through a 20-hour course on computer science designed for K-8 students. The site offers a lot of support to help teachers get started.

Code.org has a great option for exposing students to coding without too much set up. The video tutorials are interesting and engaging. Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates lead two of the video tutorials. All of the video tutorials are helpful and explain how to use the next step of the coding process. Students will move Angry Birds and Zombies through mazes using various types of code. The scaffolding process helps students go from not being able to code at all, to doing complicated multi-step moves. Students do not need to sign in to complete the hour of coding. I created a username and password for myself and saw that there is a lot more that this website offers. There is an entire K-8 Intro to Computer Science Course. From as far as I can tell, this is a free resource, but it seems you may need to have some training or attend a workshop. Either way, this is an excellent resource even if you just use the portion "Hour of Code" with your students.