What I miss from CodeWorld

[Fernando Alegre]

I would like to add my point of view to the discussion of what needs to be improved in CodeWorld from a teacher perspective. I have been using CodeWorld daily for six months with 9th grade high school students, and I combined it with Google Classroom to distribute, collect and grade student assignments.

While it was easy for the students to submit a link in Google Classroom with a hash to their CodeWorld program, for me it was difficult to deliver the assignment, because students had to go back and forth between reading a google document and using CodeWorld.

I really missed being able to add my lessons into the CodeWorld system. One way to do it if you run a local CodeWorld server is to hack the help system so that it delivers my lessons instead of (or in addition to) the standard help file, but this way is not very convenient for teachers who do not run their own server.

Another feature I missed for a teacher is to be able to add images in a controlled way, to make the assignments more appealing to the students. While I agree that if students had access to images, they would be less creative, forcing teachers to have to draw all the sprites and backgrounds for their assignments is really asking too much from teachers.

The third feature I missed is a text mode that complements the graphical modes. Sometimes, I wish I could just print a list of pairs as a scrollable table without having to create a whole CodeWorld program that emulates a console. I also miss being able to gather input parameters for a drawing at run time, in the typical style of a command line program. While I think graphics is a great way to introduce many concepts, for a few other a textual/numerical representation is necessary, and it would be ideal if the students had access to that within CodeWorld.

There are a few more things I wish CodeWorld had, but these three are the main features I missed.

Thanks,

Fernando Alegre

[Chris Smith]

Thanks, Fernando.  Great ideas, and quite timely for Summer of Haskell applications that are due on Saturday! :)

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[Jan Peter Axelsson]

Hi,

Today you can run Haskell in Jupyter notebooks and in that way combine code with text and pictures for instruction and explanations etc.

But I have no idea how to combine CodeWorld framework with Jupyter.  I have seen thought that in Jupyter notebooks you can include animations.

Just some ideas. I am newbie and scan through some mails here.

Cheers

Jan Peter

måndag 1 maj 2017 kl. 20:16:37 UTC+2 skrev cds...@gmail.com:

Thanks, Fernando.  Great ideas, and quite timely for Summer of Haskell applications that are due on Saturday! :)

On Mon, May 1, 2017 at 3:39 AM, Fernando Alegre <FAl...@ebrschools.org> wrote:

I would like to add my point of view to the discussion of what needs to be improved in CodeWorld from a teacher perspective. I have been using CodeWorld daily for six months with 9th grade high school students, and I combined it with Google Classroom to distribute, collect and grade student assignments.

While it was easy for the students to submit a link in Google Classroom with a hash to their CodeWorld program, for me it was difficult to deliver the assignment, because students had to go back and forth between reading a google document and using CodeWorld.

I really missed being able to add my lessons into the CodeWorld system. One way to do it if you run a local CodeWorld server is to hack the help system so that it delivers my lessons instead of (or in addition to) the standard help file, but this way is not very convenient for teachers who do not run their own server.

Another feature I missed for a teacher is to be able to add images in a controlled way, to make the assignments more appealing to the students. While I agree that if students had access to images, they would be less creative, forcing teachers to have to draw all the sprites and backgrounds for their assignments is really asking too much from teachers.

The third feature I missed is a text mode that complements the graphical modes. Sometimes, I wish I could just print a list of pairs as a scrollable table without having to create a whole CodeWorld program that emulates a console. I also miss being able to gather input parameters for a drawing at run time, in the typical style of a command line program. While I think graphics is a great way to introduce many concepts, for a few other a textual/numerical representation is necessary, and it would be ideal if the students had access to that within CodeWorld.

There are a few more things I wish CodeWorld had, but these three are the main features I missed.

Thanks,

Fernando Alegre

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