Share a Holiday-Themed Project with Your Classroom This Semester!

🐛 Teacher Tool: Mob Debugging

Debugging is an important part of the programming process, and it is a skill that students need to practice. Debugging exercises are also a great way to target common misconceptions. Mob debugging is a teacher strategy that combines debugging skills with collaboration skills. Here’s how it works:

Create a program in your sandbox that has a few intentional bugs. For example, if you are working with for loops, you could include a for loop header with improper syntax and have some commands outside of the loop that should be inside of the loop.
Share your program with your students using a Collaborate link. (Learn more about Real-Time Collaboration in the CodeHS Sandbox here.)
Have all of your students go to the Collaborate link. This should put all of your students in one program. Once all students are there, direct students to find and fix the bugs! Whenever a student fixes a bug, they should use a comment to write their name. Warning: This has the potential to be a little chaotic if you have a large number of students. You can simply embrace the chaos, or you can manage the numbers by splitting students into groups and giving each group their own program.
As students fix the bugs, pause to give students a chance to explain the bug and how they fixed it.

If you are interested, check out this example Karel for loops debugging exercise! You can easily make a copy of this program and add it to your sandbox by forking it.

📱 Digital Wellness Tip

A 2023 Gallup poll revealed that 13-year-olds spend an average of 4.8 hours a day on social media. Read through the report and show students one of the charts. Then, use the See-Think-Wonder routine to guide a thoughtful discussion on the topic.

See: What do you see?
Think: What does it make you think about?
Wonder: What does it make you wonder?

💗 Holiday Themed Projects

Our holiday-themed projects are perfect for supplementing your curriculum! Here are a few projects for upcoming holidays:

Explore the Project Catalog

🌟 CodeHS Curriculum in Spanish

CodeHS is proud to offer a CS curriculum designed to support Spanish-speaking English Language Learners in blended-language classrooms! Spanish curriculum is available for Python Programming 1 & 2, and AP Computer Science Principles in Python!

How It Works: Language Preference Settings

Teachers and students will be able to view the course in their preferred language which can be switched at any time. Learn how to change default language preferences here.

Learn More

📈 Coding in the Wild Blog

The Coding the Wild posts are great for showcasing how professionals use computer science across multiple disciplines. Use them as supplemental material or extra credit to expose students to the broad applications of learning to code.

I recommend using “Coding for Oil and Gas.” It’s at a great reading level for middle school students and highlights some great advice for younger coders.

"Thanks to the advancements in computers, we can develop data science algorithms to leverage large amounts of data, and I can implement these algorithms through code." - Josh Hoskinson, Data Scientist at Chevron.