Great web site for Supplementing Learning about Computer Science and Computational Thinking

Submitted 10 years ago
Art L.
Art L.
Sweetwater High School
National City CA, US
My Rating
Pedagogy
Supports

My Take

I think it is a great tool to help supplement learning of Computer Science Principles. I use this web site to teach the College Board's pilot AP Computer Science Principles course, and I think it works really great in teaching my students CSP.

The drawback is the amount of reading required by Code Academy for students to learn the topics. It has been very challenging for ELL and students of special needs. Overall, though, I would highly recommend using this Web site to supplement teaching Computer Science Principles.

How I Use It

The creators of Code Academy main mission is teach the world how to code. They have really evolved over the years, and they are using an online platform to teach Web Developer and Programming Language Skills.

The have several different modules that teach different programs. They also provide teacher training, class resources, and pupil tracking. You can learn about these programs yourself so that you can teach Computer Science Concepts to students.

You can enroll the students in a course and keep track of the units they complete. You can have students learn a module such as HTML and CSS or JavaScript; it is very cool! Students also have projects that they can quickly create in about 30 minutes. What is difficult for students at times is the amount of textual reading that have to do to complete the projects. It can be challenging, especially for ELL learners.

What is also very cool is that all of the programming platforms are found within the Code Academy Website. You do not have to have any external programming platforms.