Community reviews for codeSpark Academy

I believe this is going to be a GREAT experience for my STEM students. I would like to see coding involved in all aspects of the codeSpark experience. I would like to see an app for chromebooks as I am a 1:1 chromebook school.

I loved everything the manual, the interface the story. This year they launched the full website interface, so that means that now my students will get 1:1 devices!

This is a great introduction to coding!

I feel the app has a lot of potential. I would like to see the addition of more coding levels and possibly some coding applications to the games, especially the digital pets areas. I would say applicable for K-3 with 4th grade using it the first half of the year as my students mastered the coding levels in this time range.

I feel that the Foos is a great start... engagement is instantaneous. I am looking forward to projected updates for the Fall. It was really easy to set up to create student friendly logins. I really like the dashboard but I know I am not using it to it's full potential but it certainly meets my needs for my afterschool code club. I still have a lot to test in the CodeSpark family of products as I work through more of the resources they have available. I hope that the latest PD offerings will help me to integrate more of the products and levels with more of my student population.

The Foos is a mixed bag for me. The upside is student engagement. The downside is the ease in which students can take a coding skill-building app and skip around practice to simply 'play.' I would prefer to see this app make the playing aspect of the game an earned experience - finish a round of coding practice, play a user-generated game level. By making the gaming side so easy and attractive, it feels like the app is pulling many of our kids away from the creation of game programming and locking them into game consuming - at which they are already very proficient.

I feel this worked really well as a center since we had already learned about it. It could also work as a whole group lesson.