Getting Started with CodeHS

Thank you all so much for joining us. We're going to have a fantastic interactive 90 minutes here together for our very first webinar of the 2026 summer series. There's a lot of s's. Great alliteration there. Today's session is titled getting started with CodeHS. And if you are interested in having access to the slide deck, I will go ahead and put a link to that in the chat. If you would like to introduce yourselves in the chat, we welcome you to do that. We are going to be using the chat feature today to interact, to ask questions, and so if you would like to go ahead and open up the chat, just practice. Make sure you know where that's at, you can open up the slide deck if you want. Otherwise, obviously, I'm screen sharing and we'll continue to do that throughout our time together today. Thank you. Welcome.

We'll give it another few seconds here for folks to get settled in, get their chat open, and then I'll introduce Adriana. My name is Stephanie Bennett. I am one of the PD specialists here at CodeHS, and I have the great pleasure and honor of working with our group of teacher trainers who we bring in to webinars throughout the year in order to bring a real classroom voice to the curriculum and to help newer teachers get started to help experienced teachers spark their practice. I myself was a classroom teacher for 11 years based in Indianapolis, Indiana, but I am delighted today to be joined by our teacher trainer Adriana Rojas. So Adriana, would you like to introduce yourself?

Sure. My name is Adriana Rojas. I have been a teacher for 12 years now. I changed careers some years ago and I have been teaching with CodeHS for two years. I teach at a Catholic high school here in Lafayette, Indiana and before that I taught intro to computer science for a couple of years before I'm teaching now the course that is required for graduation here in Indiana.

Yeah. So Adriana brings a wealth of experience not only as a computer science teacher but also other subject matters and she is a professor at a college here and we are just so lucky to have her voice today and to hear her stories from the classroom. So what we're going to cover today is how do you select CodeHS curriculum? You know, I was not familiar with CodeHS when I came on board as a professional development specialist, having been in the classroom for 11 years, then wrote some computer science curriculum. I was completely overwhelmed when I first came to CodeHS and saw all of the amazing curriculum, high quality instructional materials that are available on the site. And so we're going to talk about how do you filter through all this wonderful material and select the course that's correct for your students. We're then going to work through a lesson from the student perspective. So you will see exactly what students see when they are working in CodeHS curriculum. We will talk about how to set up for day one. How do I create a course? How do I create a section? How do I roster my students? All that great stuff. And then we will dive into teacher tools and resources. So how do I customize my course once I've picked it? If things are a little too challenging for my students or if my students are really excelling and they need some extra practice and opportunity to apply their learning, how can we customize our courses and what are the different tools available both on a free and a pro license with CodeHS.

So, I mentioned we're going to be using the chat today. We're a small group, so we'll just stick with the chat. So have that open. Please feel free to go ahead and use the chat, ask questions. If I'm talking, Adriana will answer you in the chat. If Adriana's talking, I'll answer you in the chat, and we'll just have a great conversation here today and really try to tailor this session to attendees' needs as much as we can. So to that end, we want to make sure that you do have a CodeHS account. Our student and teacher accounts are always available for free in our 6 through 12 middle school and high school coding platform. And I love this about CodeHS. All of our high quality instructional materials are free for teachers and students to use and accessible. So, it just absolutely thrills me that I can work for a company that has that mission to bring computer science and high quality instructional time to students anywhere.

So, speaking of CodeHS, I did mention our middle school and high school curriculum, but we do also have an elementary platform. It is a license-based platform at that level. But let's talk a little bit about licenses and tools and what CodeHS brings. So, we are a web-based curriculum, meaning that anywhere students have a device and access to a web browser and an internet connection, they can learn computer science. We do offer professional development. Obviously, you know that because you're here with us today and we love that. And then but more than just this web-based curriculum, we also have fantastic teacher tools and resources. And some of those are available for free. LMS features like messaging your students and assigning work and monitoring student progress. And some of the tools that we offer are available through a pro license which just allows you access to some more powerful grading and academic integrity and customization tools. But again all web-based, no additional downloads or plugins needed. And so we'll dive right in here with our agenda to the curriculum. And so let's just briefly touch on our elementary course pathways. This is not going to be a focus of our session today but we are spreading the word. When I think when people hear CodeHS they think oh high school but actually we have grown and expanded and recognized the need for starting computer science teaching and learning earlier in students' learning journeys. And so we do now offer a fantastic computer science dedicated pathway or interdisciplinary pathways for K through fifth grade on our CodeHS platform. And you can learn more about CodeHS in an upcoming webinar that will be happening just in the next week or so. I can't remember the exact date off the top of my head, but I'll be at that one too. I'm absolutely thrilled to work with more elementary school teachers as we grow our computer science offerings.

Today we are here to concentrate on middle school offerings and high school pathways. So I'm going to throw a link in the chat that's to all of our pathways K through 12. And then you attendees feel free to click that link in the chat and kind of explore what's relevant to you in your teaching situation. So for middle school we suggest two different pathways either computer science explorations one and two and then move into Python basics with Tracy the Turtle one. So students will get a little bit of Python exposure or a more thorough and intense dive into Python just doing computer science explorations one and then two years of that Python basics with Tracy the Turtle. And I love the Tracy lessons. They're very visual, graphics-based output with Tracy the Turtle. So very fun middle school offerings there. And we have a variety of high school pathway offerings also. And these are all suggestions. We recognize that schools and districts have various state requirements, graduation requirements, which Adriana mentioned and that we have here in Indiana. And so these are just suggestions that you might follow. Definitely not anything that is set in stone or has to be done this way. Again, these are just ideas and ways for you to think about how your district can set students up for success in computer science for multiple years without repeating curriculum or without getting students kind of stuck in a rut in their learning. We'll always have something new and fresh for sure. So, this is our AP computer science pathway where students start with Carol the dog, our mascot who's behind me on the screen here, and learning our intro to CS and JavaScript Corgi course, then AP CS Principles, AP CSA, followed by potentially data structures in C++, one recommended high school pathway for your consideration. Another one is cybersecurity. We know this is a growing field and so here we have a pathway with Corgi AP CS Principles cybersecurity flavor. There are a couple different flavors of this AP computer science principles course. And then we have a fundamentals of cybersecurity course and brand new as of last fall, a complete year-long advanced cybersecurity course as well. And we are developing, I will say not published quite yet, but we are providing a course that will be aligned to the new AP cybersecurity course which is different from the APCSP cybersecurity course. So, if you have been hearing buzz in the AP world about the new AP cybersecurity course, we are offering an aligned curriculum for that. Just not quite ready for teachers' full use yet. You can sign up to preview that curriculum, however, right now. If your district is interested in Python, then we recommend Intro to Python Programming, APCSP, this time in Python, data science and applications of AI and machine learning as that capstone course.

And one more pathway here for your consideration. If web development is something students are interested in in your district, we have a fantastic course called web design Picasso introducing students to HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Then we would want students to get a little more exposure to JavaScript. That's the language that makes our websites interactive when we can click things and watch videos. Then move on to web development and mobile apps. So Adriana, I'd love for you to chime in here. What is your favorite CodeHS course and why?

I have been using the Indiana computer foundations for a digital age. We made that decision with the computer science team at my school because that one aligns completely with the Indiana requirements for graduation. So, it has been a blessing to not have to worry about if we are covering everything. It has everything that I need as a teacher, all the standards, everything is there for me and I can even move lessons if I feel that that lesson aligns with something more advanced I can move it so it's very teacher friendly and I can see everything that the students are doing: the pace, how much they did, it even has an AI for grades, so I love that. So if I want to really dig in and see what the students are doing I can do it manually, but if I feel that we cover a lot during class and I just want to give them a grade, I can just click the AI and it gives them a grade. So that saves me time. In general I feel that all the CodeHS courses are very teacher focused, like they are designed to save time for the teacher. They are well-planned and it has a lot of resources, so I love that.

Well, thank you for that insight. Yeah, those graduation requirement courses are becoming more frequent in different states and so yeah, we'll talk about how folks can find course-specific courses here in one second. And because that Indiana Computing Foundations for a Digital Age course, that is such a mouthful, it covers a lot of different topics. So, what are the computer science topics that tend to engage your students the most?

That's another thing that I like, that it really covers a great variety of all the different topics that are required for graduation. And I like how it is displayed, I feel that it starts very student-friendly. So with topics that are very easy for them and then the last one is Python that is a little bit more challenging. So it's very well scaffolded. So one of the things that they engage, at least in this last couple semesters, are cybersecurity for sure, they are very interested about things like that, digital citizenship for sure because that relates to the daily things that they do as teenagers, and Python even when it starts rough for them because it's hard to get familiar with, I feel that at the end students come all the time so excited if they finally got it. So, I feel that those three things were the topics that they engaged the most.

Fantastic. And we'll come back to that theme of what's really clicking with students and how can you incorporate more of that in your course when we get to the course customization in a bit. And I also love that you mentioned that easy entry point. You know, in Indiana, this computer science course is a graduation requirement, but it's an entry-level computer science course. And so, since every student has to take it, we did take great care to make sure that if students have never had a computer science class before, it's still very doable. And like you said, relatable to students, how they use and interact with AI, how they interact with web apps, it's very applicable to their lives, it's very relevant to their lives while keeping that aligned to state standards, but still very entry level and accessible to students. So I appreciate you mentioning that for sure. And so Adriana teaches an Indiana state-specific course and we do offer for states that have big initiatives around computer science, we do offer courses for state-specific requirements. And so if you live in a place like Tennessee, which just very recently launched a new curriculum adoption, or if you live in Texas, which a couple years ago did a big curriculum adoption in computer science, definitely check out our state-specific courses. We won't go into any of those because they are very individualized. But Idaho, Utah, Oklahoma, all of those states are really focusing on computer science and even some of them are making it a graduation requirement for high schoolers. And so, we do try our best to, when states have big initiatives like that, make sure that our courses are fully aligned so teachers don't have to go searching for extras, filling in gaps to make sure they hit all the standards. And you can find our standards alignments to make sure. You can see exactly where for this state standard, here's the lessons that meet that one in our standards framework tool. So, okay. So things to consider when selecting curriculum: are your students introductory? Do they need a lot of scaffolding and easy-to-digest chunks of information? Or have your students had some computer science exposure or do you have a mix? Because probably that's the case right in a lot of schools. Do you want to focus on a specific computer science topic like web design or cybersecurity or AI? Or do you want your students to have a broad exposure to a lot of different aspects of computer science? And then again, the difficulty: are your students ready or maybe some of your students ready for more advanced topics? Other things to consider for selecting a course: how much time do you have? Do you have a semester, like Adriana teaches her graduation requirement in one semester, or do you have the luxury of a full school year with your students? Do you want your students to be able to do some block coding before they enter into syntax and text-based coding in Python or JavaScript? Again, we've talked about difficulty and standards, a very important one. Are there specific standards that you need to make sure you address? And you know, can CodeHS support you in finding that perfect material? And so Adriana, your case is specific. You teach a very purposeful course for the graduation requirement. Was there anything you want to add to that conversation about picking, selecting a course?

Well, we were looking of course that it aligned to the requirements for graduation, but it was important for me because I teach a lot of other courses to be practical and to be something that the kids can relate to, and that it was related to their daily life. Because I have taught computer science before when it is not very hands-on and the kids get bored, and CodeHS and this particular course has a lot of opportunities to do it kind of like project-based. And I get the kids as involved as I can since day one, we do a contract that we are going to do this together, they are not going to use AI to solve the problems or whatever, we are going to collaborate and the kids really like that, I feel that they own what they are learning. Another thing that I have implemented and that I think that it's very useful for them, and that the course in CodeHS gives me the opportunity to, is to be able to make it very related to the day-to-day, to what they do as teenagers. So, like I said before, I preview all the lessons and if there is something that I feel that it's not relatable or that I have to move or if I want to incorporate something else, it gives me the opportunity to do that. Yeah, I don't know if I answered your question though.

No, I love that piece about relatability. Computer science can be very abstract, right? Like if you just said the word algorithm to a random person on the street, they'd be like, "What is that?" So the concepts can be really abstract. And so yes, I think that's a super important factor when selecting a curriculum is how do I make this concrete for students? How do I make it real for them? So yeah, I love that you brought that up. So, thinking back to like your first year teaching computer science, CodeHS or not, what pacing advice do you have for a really new computer science teacher? Because not only does CodeHS have a ton of options for curriculum, but there's just a lot there. You mentioned that there's a lot of opportunities for practice and like you're not going to grade every single thing, right? So what pacing advice do you have for a new user coming into computer science?

Well, thinking about the first year that I taught this course or that I taught anything related to computer science, previewing the course and having just like a little bit of time to know what you're talking about is very important. I have noticed that when I prepare better, the kids respond a little bit better, and the other thing is not to rush things. If I know that there is a concept that they haven't gotten but I have my syllabus and I really want to stick to the schedule, it has never paid me good if I just rush through it because I feel that computer science really builds on top of the previous knowledge that they have, especially unit five in this particular course that is Python. So not to rush it and to involve the kids a lot. It has been really good. There is always one kid at least in the classroom that gets it. And usually I do groups, and I put like the kids that have no idea in a table with that person. And it has been really great to see that these kids step up. So do not rush it, be prepared, know what you're talking about. And the great thing is that because all the courses are already there, all the lessons are there, it has like everything that you need. Even when you have to prepare, it doesn't take that long. All the videos are there, all the resources, everything is very teacher friendly.

That's music to my ears. I love it when I can make a fellow teacher's life easier. All right. So, Jennifer is asking about cybersecurity for seventh graders. So Jennifer, I would recommend taking a look at our fundamentals of cyber course. I know that I mentioned that particular course in the high school pathway, but I do think that the fundamentals of cybersecurity is a great first-year cyber course because that first unit is all about cybersecurity and students. It starts with digital footprint. What is my digital footprint? What considerations do I need to make as I move through a technological world, right? And so I do think that even for seventh graders, that would be accessible too. So definitely check that one out. Let me know what you think. So when we are in the course catalog, there's a lot there, but we have some fantastic filters that I encourage you to use. And so let's just pop over to the course catalog and I'll show you how to use some of these tags and filters.

So let's start with state because I mentioned that there are definitely some brand new ones. Idaho, we just released this Idaho digital literacy course like January or February, I think. And so, making sure you're hitting your state standards is obviously very important to educators. So, if we have a course that is completely aligned, definitely start with that as the basis. Let me unfilter that. Then, if you have a particular grade level, so middle school or high school, you can filter here. And then just for fun, let's filter by grade level middle school and cybersecurity for Jennifer. Let's say we don't have a specific one for that. But for high school, like we said, this fundamentals of cyber course could be really interesting for your students. Game design, we have a couple of courses. I know that's a big attraction when students see game design in a course title. So if that will be a great hook into computer science for your students, or if you are interested in those AP courses, Cortado is our newest CSA course, built specifically for the rewrite that happened from College Board last summer. And those different flavors of APCSP that I was talking about in the pathways, you can also just search, like if you want to search for artificial intelligence, then you know you can search for specific terms there, too, by just typing in that text box. So, definitely take some time and explore the course catalog. In fact, I'm going to just set aside one minute for you to go ahead and do that. Let me though first back up and get you the link that you need.

All right. So, attendees, in the chat is a link to the course catalog, and I'm going to give you one minute here to go ahead and just build some muscle memory, play around with those filters, and see if you can find a course that might work for your students.

All right. Well, we are on a whirlwind tour here. And so, after exploring curriculum, next up on our agenda was actually getting into a lesson. And Adriana so kindly complimented our lessons and the lesson plans that come with Pro licenses. And so, I want to show you what does this look like from the student side? And so what I'm gonna ask you to do is I'm gonna ask you actually to sign up in a course where Adriana and I are the teachers, and attendees, you will put on your student hat and be a student. So you will need a CodeHS account and if it asks you to do some questions for the teacher side, that's fine. We are going to focus on the student side for right now. So, you are going to click on the link I just put in the chat for join the section as a student. And what you will see once you click on that codehs.com/go/95e is you will see a page that says summer webinar getting started join section. So, click this big blue button here. And then I've paired down the curriculum here. I actually used our middle school mix and match to build this section. I didn't want to overwhelm you with tons and tons of curriculum. So, I did pair this down a little bit. And one thing I am going to do is I'm also going to sign in as a student and we'll just see what this looks like from the student perspective together. So let me reshare.

Alrighty. So, this is what it looks like from the student perspective. And I wanted to take you through this lesson, introduction to Carol. So, this lesson will give us a little preview into the text editor, we'll be able to see block coding versus text-based coding. And this is a middle school introduction to coding in JavaScript in this unit called exploring code with Carol. And one thing that our curriculum team has done a great job of in this particular middle school course is using a very story-based series of lessons to engage students in learning how to code at the very basics of coding. Carol is our mascot. She's a dog and she only knows a very few commands. And we have to learn Carol's language in order to give her commands just like you would train any dog, right? Dogs know a few commands: sit, stay, roll over, bark. But if you changed up those words and instead of bark, you said speak to your dog, your dog might not know what to do. And so we have to be on the same page in how we communicate with Carol. Yeah, that's always the question: is Carol a boy, a girl, do they use pronouns? I say Carol's a girl. It gets mixed up in our different courses though. So yes, we all love Carol though. The students come to love Carol and lots of fun to be had there for sure.

So in this particular introduction to coding, we're going to watch a quick video. We will do a quick check for understanding. It's a multiple choice quiz. There will be an example exercise where we can see expert written code and play with it, tinker with it, and then we will have our own coding exercises. And Adriana, I'm going to throw you a question here. We have teachers who let students do their work very self-paced, students are learning at their own rate, everybody's learning something different in the classroom. And then we have teachers who really prefer everybody being on the same activity, the same day, learning the same content. And the teachers facilitate a lot of collaboration, a lot of engagement in the classroom because everybody's learning the same thing at the same time. And we have teachers who swing back and forth and do a mix of everything. How do you work with students in kind of that perspective of very self-paced versus everybody learning the same thing at the same time? How do your students prefer?

I think that in my classroom is a little bit of both. Most of the time we learn the same thing at the same pace because I like the collaboration aspect of it and I love the discussions. If we are all doing the same thing, it came to my mind the lesson that we were doing in submarine cables for the internet and how that works. Kids were asking me all kinds of questions so I put them to okay, let's research, and I put them into groups and each group had a different question and we were going to research about it and then kids will come to the front of the classroom and present what they have found. So I like that aspect of doing it all at the same pace. But there are lessons that if I feel that they are easy enough or I know that the kids have prior knowledge about it, like digital citizenship or the videos, there is one about how to do instructional videos, I let them do it at their own pace. But at one point I say, okay you have until Tuesday to do this and you can do it all today, you can do it one thing at a time. Part of owning your own learning is if you finish before, you can do something else related to school. For some kids that I know cannot be distracted, I always have extra material ready and I say when you finish, you have this to do. So, a little bit of both. But I definitely like the aspect of collaboration when we are all going on the same pace.

Yeah, and I bet that's good variety for your students. So that's awesome. All right. Well, let's put on our student hats. Let's dive in here and see what this Carol character is all about.

Hi. In this lesson, we'll introduce you to Carol. Meet Carol. Carol is a dog who listens to your commands. Carol lives in a grid world enclosed by walls along the edge. Each dot represents a space where Carol can stand on. We can move Carol around the grid world and even command Carol to put down and pick up tennis balls. More specifically, Carol knows four commands: move, turn left, put ball, and take ball. The move command moves Carol by one space in the direction that Carol is facing.

All right. Okay. Now, one thing I do like is that you can play these videos for students in front of the classroom just like I am for you all. Now, once you get more familiar with the curriculum and you want to take this a little bit more control and customization to meet your students' needs, you actually have access to the slide decks here. And you can download these, you can change them, you can do whatever you want with these slides to make sure that your students get what they need out of direct instruction time. So I just up here you can flip from the video to the slides. So if I wanted to say, "All right, students, now let's practice those four commands and let's talk about the syntax." Yes, students do also have access to the slides. It's all right here and easy for you to do the teaching instead of facilitating with that video. But if it's your first year, highly recommend rolling with the videos until you get comfortable. Okay, so we've watched our video. We're going to continue on in the student side. Remember, this is the student side. I actually forgot for a minute. Yes, we are looking at what the students can do and see on the curriculum. So yes, they have access to the videos and slides. You have access to the videos and slides. And so let's take this quiz. Which of these is a valid Carol command? So here we're looking for JavaScript syntax, that is what we're focusing on here with this question. We know we need open and close parentheses and a semicolon to call a function. And so we're going to click check. Yay, we got the correct answer, and we move on. And so maybe you do that together as a class because it's obviously a very quick check for understanding formative assessment.

But here we're in the code editor and this is an example program. So there's already code here as you can see, if you're used to seeing text-based JavaScript. This is what it looks like. If you are used to a scratch-based coding environment and more comfortable with blocks, students can switch from a block view to a text-based view in our Carol world. Not available in all languages, but in Carol and HTML, CSS and some Python, we have block coding available. And so yes, oh sorry, sorry to interrupt. I just want to answer the question. They were asking if you can lock the sections to prevent students from moving ahead.

Yeah. So that is a pro tool. Pacing, the ability to pace students and lock content down, is a pro license feature. And so I can show you what that looks like in a little bit. Thank you. I had missed that question in the chat. So these example exercises are just fully formed code ready for students to tinker, play, experiment with. So if we run this program, we can watch Carol complete each command, and we can slow Carol down, run the program a little bit more slow. We can speed Carol up. Oh, that was too quick even for my eyes. Or we can reset the program and we can just step one click at a time through this program. So the examples will show the ending world, the successful program execution. We do have this docs tab where students can access everything that they might be learning. For example, if they forget how to write a loop in JavaScript, they can open this documentation, navigate to for loops, and they'll get a reminder here. Somebody was also asking about the slides, and students can actually see the slides side-by-side with the coding environment, which I really, really love because that's super helpful for students to go back to a slide they remember from the video and find that information they need to complete their program. Students can also message teachers. So here in this conversation tab, I can say, "Hey, I like this program." And send it to my teacher if I wanted. Teacher can write back. So that's a little preview of our coding environment in the Carol IDE. So let's continue on. Here we have another video. This one's going to walk us through the syntax of JavaScript.

Hi. In this lesson, we're going to talk about Carol syntax, parentheses, and semicolons. What's that all about? As a reminder, syntax is the rules for how to write code in a programming language. And each programming language might have a different syntax. So, let's look at some more at Carol's syntax.

All right. And we're just going to keep rolling because like I said, we're on a speedy mission here to just preview what the student experience looks like. So, here is our first coding assignment. Adriana, how do your students feel when they get into their first coding? I know you teach Python instead of JavaScript, but are they excited for it? Are they ready or are they a little nervous?

They usually are a little nervous, but it gets better when we start going into it. And another feature that I really like is that I can give them a second chance. Like if a student comes and says, "Hey, I messed up, I got zero points. But now I get it. Now that we reviewed it together as a class or somebody else helped me to understand, can I redo it?" I can go to that specific student and give them another chance and they can redo it. But yeah, they usually, when they are not familiar with code, they usually are a little nervous about it, but the good thing is that this program is very scaffolded. We start with something very, very simple so it really helps them to get to the more difficult parts.

Yeah, I love that. So this one we actually have a buggy program. And so we've got to find the error, which is a little bit more obvious here in the block coding. So let's switch to the text-based coding. And here we can see we have a move command but the syntax isn't right. We don't have our open and close parentheses. We don't have our semicolon. And here we've spelled move wrong which would trip up Carol. Carol doesn't know move with two V's. Carol only knows move spelled correctly. And so now we can run our code and we can see great job, we got it. And we can submit and continue and move on to the next video and assignment. So it does start really quite basic, but we love showing off this view of the student side of the program. I think I went through all that. So oh, classroom routines. Adriana, can you talk to us a little bit about how you manage students when they're really getting into assignments. If five students have questions at the same time, what do you do?

Well, usually I have a rule that first they can ask me all the questions without consulting other resources or anything the first time that we are doing something. But then if we are doing the same thing in the next class, they need to use at least one other resource: their notes, or ask a friend or something like that before they ask me. And we keep increasing that, so the third time they have to use two resources before they ask the teacher and things like that. And that helps them a lot because most of the time they are errors like this: "Oh, I misspelled something," or "I didn't put the semicolon." And if I have 28 students, I cannot go one by one, and that really helps them. By the third or fourth time that we are doing the same thing, they know that they should review their things first, ask a friend, and then ask the teacher. But at least the first time, I let them make mistakes, ask me as many questions as they want and all that. And like I said, usually a couple kids get them the first time and then they become kind of like my helpers around, and they love that.

Yeah, you can really get some kiddos who maybe in other classes and subject areas are really quiet and reserved and you get them with the computer science, right? And then they're like, "Oh, yeah. I can be the helper. I can help my peers and be more vocal than I am in other subject areas." Yeah, I love that.

All right. So, we talked a little bit about this from the student perspective, but from the teacher side of things, some terminology to be familiar with as you're working with CodeHS: a module is interchangeable with a unit. Lessons are one day's worth of teaching generally, and then activities or assignments are those individual items that students engage with on the CodeHS site. Now, one thing I forgot to point out while I had the student view pulled up was that maybe you noticed along the bottom, you could see those little icon bubbles and they were changing colors as we were engaging with and submitting assignments. And so, these are important to become familiar with because they are used throughout the CodeHS site. In the student perspective and in the teacher progress monitoring and the teacher gradebook, these colors all mean the same thing. Gray means that a student has not opened an assignment yet. Yellow means a student has opened an assignment but not submitted it. That lime green color means that it's waiting for your teacher eyes to grade something. Pink means the teacher has sent it back to the student for additional work. So, Adriana, you mentioned sometimes students don't get it the first time and you have the ability to send things back to students and say, "Well, this isn't your best work. Let's try this again." And so then magenta means that you need to grade it after a student has worked on it. And then that teal green color means that either an autograder like what we saw with Carol or you the teacher have finalized a grade.

Okay. So a couple questions I'm seeing in the chat and I'm loving them. First, students submitting the videos. How to answer? Clicking continue marks that the students have watched the video or clicking through the last slide marks that students have watched the video, and then by default those are included in the gradebook and they are assigned a point each. So, yes, sort of students have to submit. But if you choose as the teacher, like "I don't want to give students points for watching videos," then you can take those out of the gradebook and then students wouldn't have to submit them. But students get kind of obsessed with getting all teal bubbles. Adriana, do you find that with your students, they hate having that one yellow bubble?

Yes.

Yeah. And so they want to submit the video and get that teal bubble. And then things like pair coding access. Oh, yes. So, Jennifer, we're going to hopefully have time to get to the sandbox in our teacher tool preview. And yes, students can collaborate live and do pair coding in the sandbox. So, hopefully we'll have time for that. I'll try to carve out some time. So, we talked about the different activity types, different ways to use videos versus slide decks. If you were into a flipped classroom routine, definitely have students preview those videos at home, then come and use your classroom time for the exercises and the example codes. Adriana, lots of videos in the Indiana course, but also some clickable kind of notebooks and reflections for students to engage with. Which ones do you think kind of hit with your students the most?

I mean all the CodeHS lessons are, I will say, very versatile. So I can always incorporate projects into it. At least I have the rule that we do one hands-on project per unit because I don't want them to just be in the platform all the time. I think that it's important for them. The platform has a lot of different things, like the videos they have to answer questions, so it is not the same thing over and over, but I want them to, after they learn something, be able to apply it. So I do a combination of the platform and project-based.

I love that, it's got to be really engaging for your students. So we did talk about the examples. It's the expert code. Research has shown that when students have the opportunity to read expert written code, it helps improve their writing of code. And so, lots of different ways to use those examples. I'm going to keep rolling here and talk about the coding exercises themselves. We just had a great question about pair programming. Yes, you can do that. Adriana, do you use the sandbox and let students code together with your Python coursework?

I don't use the sandbox, but I definitely do the pair programming. Sometimes I even have more than two students doing one project. One of the things that I remember that worked really well was I put the kids in teams and each one had to give me a problem and they had to solve it in Python. Like if I design something, it was like team A gives their problem to team B, team B to C and like that. So they were all solving somebody else's problem kind of, and they had to do it with three or four kids all together, but like I said the platform is so flexible that I could manage that pretty easy. And yeah, there is a question on the chat about if all the lessons are 45 minutes or so.

Yeah. So, not necessarily. Some lessons might be quoted at like 120 minutes, or some of our more challenging coding might be even stretched across 3 or 4 days. So, it's something to keep an eye on as you're flipping through lesson plans when deciding on where is that natural kind of break for my students from this part A of a lesson to where can we come back tomorrow or in two days if you're on a block schedule and pick up again. So, let's see.

All right. So, let's get into setup. All right. So, we've learned a lot about the curriculum. We've learned what it looks like from the student perspective. How do I, the teacher, get ready to teach? Again, some vocabulary. We talked about units and modules and lessons and activities and assignments. Another CodeHS vocabulary piece that will help you is courses are the content, it's what your students are going to learn and engage with. Sections are rosters, how do your students access the material? So, one of my PD specialist colleagues came up with this fantastic chart and I think it really helped me solidify it in my mind that whenever you are setting up a course, you are making a copy of the CodeHS canonical course, but you get to play with that. You get to take content out. You get to add content. You get to reorder content to your heart's desire. So we have the CodeHS course catalog. You make a copy of a course you like and want your students to have, and then you make sections to roster your students and get them access to that content. And so maybe you might have three periods using the same course or two periods of web design using the same course like we're showing here in this diagram.

So, I'm going to put a knowledge-base article in the chat and then I'm going to walk you through live. How do we create a course? How do we create a section? We're throwing a lot of information at you. So, don't feel like you have to memorize all of this right now in this 90-minute webinar. We have the knowledge base. We have a fantastic support team that you always have access to on the site. So definitely don't feel pressure to internalize all of this right now in the moment. If you would like to, I would invite you to put the Zoom screen up on one half of your screen and maybe put the CodeHS platform up on the other side of your screen and we can do a little side-by-side. That might be helpful here.

Now you were on the student side of the platform and that looks like this. We want to switch to the teacher side now so you can practice setting up a test or demo course. So up here in the upper left-hand corner we have a drop-down menu where you can switch to the teacher side. Your landing page is going to look like this, although I have a bunch of sections as I do these workshops and webinars regularly. In order to set up a new course, we're going to move over to the left-hand navigation, open up the assignments toolbox, and click on courses. This is where we're going to make a copy of one of those CodeHS courses that we love. So you can click on this green button create a new course and then I would suggest, especially if you're a new computer science teacher or a new CodeHS user, use one of our course templates. You do have the option of just making an empty course and adding in individual content, but until you have a really good feel for what's available, that's going to be difficult. So let's choose a course template. And here again, you can filter the course catalog. So maybe I want to do middle school. I personally love this middle school mix and match course. So I'm going to make a copy of that. And I'm going to call it 2026 middle school. I'm going to click next. And it's copying all of that content. And here is where I can now create sections for my students to roster to. Now, you might not know your schedule for next school year yet. That's okay. We're just building some muscle memory here. We're just playing around. So, let's add a section. And let's just call this test practice section. We'll click next. And now all of those assignments have been copied into this section. And we can add students. So, let's just view those assignments if they've populated. Sometimes if it's a larger course, it takes a little bit, but it looks like yes, all of my content for middle school mix and match is here. The work we were doing from the student side was this exploring code with Carol unit which I just absolutely love. Now, how do I get my students here, right? So, we're going to go to the classroom toolbox and we're going to click on roster and to get your students their free accounts, they just need a computer and a web browser and they go to this link which was custom created for your section and they will automatically be created student accounts and be able to log in from here on out directly to your course and your section. You do have some options here of managing your students. If you need to change a username or change a password, we can do that. Let me get into one of these so you can see what it looks like. So this is where I can see my list of students. I can allow blocks if I have a pro license. I can prevent copy-paste if I have a pro license. And so all of these per-student settings I have access to here. Back on the manage page is where I can change usernames or passwords if I need to or set a preferred language. Right now we have English and Spanish available.

All right. So we have copied a course. We have set up a section. We have rostered some students and we have about 30 minutes left to get into some teacher tools. So, I want to go back to our slide deck here. So, Adriana, you were talking to us about projects that you ask your students to do and kind of some customization to really get your students engaged. Is there anything kind of unique that you do at the beginning of the school year to set up your course?

In terms of classroom culture, I really focus the kids into collaboration and keep trying, not give up after the first try or so. So I emphasize that a lot during the first lessons that are kind of easy. So when more challenging things come along, they already have that kind of mindset. In terms of me, like I said, I try to be prepared and know what the course is about. I love the feature that you can see everything like preview the course, see the slides, and I remember that there is a part where you can see the teacher version versus the student version. I use a lot of the resources and I try to not reinvent the wheel but use as much as I can from the website. So yeah, I hope that I answered your question.

Yeah absolutely. So, that's a great lead-in. Actually, I should show this. So, once you've got your course selected, you've set up a section, then you do have all these assignments sitting here. And I agree with you. Sometimes computer science teachers are volunteered to teach computer science, right? Sometimes computer science teachers are one day ahead of their students in their learning. And that's common. Folks, if you are sitting in that space right now, please hear us. That is a very, very common occurrence. And so, yeah, Adriana was talking about the lesson plans here, the handouts. So, if you just go to the left-hand navigation, open the assignments toolbox, and then click on the assignments app, if you have a pro license, you will have access to every single lesson's lesson plans and handouts. So we can see here if we open this up, the lesson plans have a wealth of information: objectives, what the students are going to work on, answer keys to help you coach and help students debug, handouts both student-facing and answer keys for handouts. And then here's where we can get a little bit of a feel for how long a lesson's going to take. For example, having students log in with their usernames and passwords going to take five minutes. Giving a little tour of the course, there's a scavenger hunt principal activity, probably 10 minutes. Watching the introductory video going to take five minutes, reviewing the example code five minutes, having students do that first debugging exercise 5 to 10 minutes, and then completing a coded program on their own 5 minutes. And then we do also have some opener and closer activities, the ability to do an exit ticket or a bell ringer. If that's a routine that you like as a teacher, keep that routine, right? If it works for you and your students, then keep those routines. We provide questions that make great bell ringers and exit tickets along with answers in the lesson plans. So, definitely a great resource. I'm glad you brought that up, Adriana.

And so, thinking we're about to talk about how to add, remove, reorder content from that assignments page, how much of that did you do your first year? What advice would you give a newer teacher about making changes to the CodeHS course?

I didn't make a lot of changes the first year just because I wanted to be familiar with the platform and the lessons and all that. I made smaller changes the next year, and by now I feel that I'm very familiar with what to use. And the other thing is that the videos, for example, I always watch them first just to make sure that they were not like 10 minutes long or something, even if I speed it up just to have an idea of what they were about, and I sometimes write down discussion questions for the video so they are not just watching a video for seven minutes or so without following up. So I make very small changes here and there. Instead, I will just recommend to be familiar with the website before you start deleting lessons or doing something, and to give the students a chance to experiment and kind of just do it. Because sometimes I saw a lesson and I'm like, "Oh, this is too long," or "This is like..." and then I teach it and the kids love it. It depends sometimes on the classes, too, like smaller classes we do a lot more discussion than bigger classes. So yeah, I think that, and the kids are very forgiving when there's a lesson that I should not keep for the next time or vice versa if they need more resources on one of the topics. They are very flexible with that but definitely, definitely I will recommend to take a minute. It doesn't take that much of your time. I know that it can be overwhelming as a teacher to start teaching a new class or to get familiar with the website, but like I said it's very user friendly and thanks to God that there are videos about everything now and resources like they can contact you or another teacher that has taught this course before. Yeah, it's very teacher friendly. So, I appreciate that design aspect of the website, how easy it is to manage.

Yeah, thank you for all of that. I agree with everything you're saying there. So, we'll go really quickly through a little bit of customization and then move on to some teacher tools that will be really helpful to you as you're using CodeHS in the classroom also. So, you do have the ability to reorder content. So, for example, if you pick a course and coding comes at the end, but you really think that your students will engage better with the course if the coding comes at the beginning, you have the ability and control to move all that around. You can delete content, although like Adriana said, you know, be careful, you don't want to miss a standard that you need to cover or make a gap in learning from one topic to another, but you have the ability. And you can also add content, either your own or other CodeHS content. And so let's jump over and I'll just really quickly kind of run through that. So, we're going to go back to that assignments view. And to drag and drop modules around, you can just click edit, drag, move that first, although they probably need to know some Carol code before they approach the challenges. Click done. At the module level, you can drag and drop. However, for other lessons or even individual activities, you do have to use these up and down arrows. So, for example, if I wanted to move Super Carol above commenting your code, I can just say move up and now Super Carol is 1.7 and commenting your code is 1.8. So, you do have the ability to move modules, lessons, and individual activities using the three-dot menu and these up and down arrows. You can also open this and delete content. You can delete whole modules. You can delete just a lesson or you can delete the videos. If you don't want all the videos, you can just delete those, too, but they're hard to add back. So with caution, proceed with caution. And then you can also add content like I said, your own content. So you know if you've taught computer science for a couple of years, you have some projects that really resonate with your students, bring them over to CodeHS. You can do that. You can click add. You can add a module. You can add a lesson. You can add an assignment. So, if there is a video that really resonated with your students and you want to add that from YouTube or a Vimeo, you can do that. You can add a quiz if you want to make a quiz. You can add a slide deck if you have an old slide deck that really worked for your students. Just click on add a new assignment. And then I didn't make a new blank module here or a new blank lesson. So, I'll just click create. And then you can choose from, like I said, lots of different types of activities. You can even build a new coding exercise if your heart desires. So that is customizing. I do also want to show you that you can add from the project catalog too. So you will never run out of curriculum with CodeHS, that I can guarantee you because there is not only all of these fantastic courses, but we've got extras. The project center is a fantastic resource. So, we've got some themes. We've got different hours. We've got different middle school versus high school, beginner versus advanced coders. Definitely take a look at some of those projects. You can even filter and search there.

All right, so let's get into the tools that are available on the site. The first one is communication and I previewed that a little bit on the student side of things. So, I'm going to put an article in the chat and you will be able to come back to this if you need to. Adriana, do you ever use the chat feature inside the assignments with your students or do you just have them raise their hand in class to ask questions?

I used it a couple semesters ago when I had a really big class, but for the past couple of semesters I had a smaller class. So, I haven't used it a lot. And then to be honest, sometimes they were like, "Hey, I put a question in the chat," and I was like, "Oh yeah, yeah." So, but it is helpful if you have a bigger audience or if you give a couple kids something to do and they are working on something more advanced or they are doing self-paced, that becomes really handy.

Yeah, I would agree with that. Especially if we have virtual school teachers and remote teachers. And yeah, definitely if you are in one of those kind of teaching scenarios where it's asynchronous or it's virtual, then definitely the conversations tab is helpful. Maybe even summer school and your students have to get through a lot of content condensed into just a couple weeks of summer school. Then yeah, having the ability for them to message you directly in the assignment is really helpful because then you don't have to remember, "Oh, what was that reflection question they're asking about?" You can just see the question right there next to the assignment when you're in that kind of asynchronous space. So, I love those use cases.

So that individual student-to-teacher communication is available. You can also send announcements just like you would a, "Hey, class, homework is due on Friday. Make sure everything's turned in." And so you can find those on the platform. Also, somebody asked earlier about can you lock students from progressing too quickly through assignments? And this is a pro feature, the ability to lock assignments down and make them inaccessible but still visible to students, to add due dates that would then play into some gradebook settings. So there are definitely ways with our pro license to, Adriana was mentioning, giving second chances for quizzes, retakes. We saw those copy-paste settings and block versus text settings. So a lot of configuration definitely can be done from that configure app. So let me show you where to find that if you do have a pro license or are interested in having your district talk to CodeHS about purchasing one. Lots of great tools here for teachers. So in the assignments toolbox in the left-hand navigation, clicking on the configure app is where we can decide what is visible to students. So here at the end of this course I have made the final exam, the final project and these second semester kind of modules all invisible. Students wouldn't even know that they were there when they logged in. And I have set some due dates on some of these. And then you can also decide if it's visible, do I want students to be able to access it? So, really great customization and pacing there for the pro users.

Lesson plans we talked about. The first five are free to free users. Pro users, we gave you a tour of what those look like. If you would like to learn more details about anything you saw in the lesson plans, like the problem guides, those answer keys for the coding problems, definitely check out the knowledge-base article that I just put in the chat because there's a lot to dig into in those lesson plans.

And then feedback. So we have a code review app where you can answer student questions, you can review students' work, do some grading. It is a very powerful place for teachers to review student progress and provide feedback. So Adriana, there's a lot here for teachers to do. How do you help your students help themselves? How do you put more ownership around feedback and reflection into the hands of students?

Like I said, I use a lot of collaboration, discussion, pair programming, case studies, and that is already there in CodeHS. So, I like that. I have used, let me go to the website because I don't want to say something that it's not the correct term, but I remember that when they are in a certain lesson, there is like a more feature like in one of the tabs, and they can see, let me see if I can see it right here, they can see like more about it. If we are doing, yeah, there is a more feature and it has the slides, the share, even like the solution there for teachers. So I use as many resources that the website has already, but definitely I try to engrave in the students that this is like their own personal experience and they will learn as much as or as little as they want. And because technology and technology-related topics are something that they want to learn most of the time because they are so immersed into their daily lives, I feel that students respond very well about owning their own learning. And when we have discussions, I mean, you will be amazed what kind of questions they have or what opinions they have and things like that in terms of cybersecurity or digital citizenship. It has been very nice for me to hear your perspective.

So yeah, I love that. What I hear you talking about is that shift from being a user of technology to understanding that you can create technology, you can create with technology, right? And that's like the entire point of the field of computer science is to move students from just passive users to creators. And I love it sounds like your students are really, that's clicking with them. By the time they leave your course, they understand that they have the power to learn how to make these things that are so engaging to them and relatable to them. I just want to be a student in your class honestly.

Thank you. Thank you. And one thing that I have learned that is very useful for them is to ask them, "Now explain this to me." I kind of shift like, now you have to tell me what this is about. And we have done a couple projects that they have to present or do it in groups, like this group explains something to this group and this group, and then I have like a feedback form about what they learned from each other, things like that. The kids love it.

Yeah. I remember when I was in the classroom, I was probably six or seven years into my professional time in the classroom and I can remember another teacher saying, "Who's doing the work in your classroom? Is it you? Are you the one talking? Are you the one coding? Are you the one always doing the hard work of learning? Or is it your students? Are we providing students with the time and the materials and the space to be the ones doing the work?" And it sounds like in your classroom they are. And that's just fantastic. Love it. Love it. Love it.

Okay, I think we have time for one more teacher tool. Maybe two. We can probably do a quick preview of academic integrity, but grading first. Okay, so grading can be found in code review and it's a free feature. Let me actually hop over because we did talk about code review and then I just buzzed right by it. Okay, so in the left-hand navigation we have our grading toolbox and this app code review. Very useful. You can see here all of the questions your students have sent you, you can see the assignments that you need to grade and this is where free and pro have access to this, anybody can do their grading. Now, if you have a pro license, Adriana at the very top of this session mentioned AI grading. So, we have a couple different grading features. Everybody gets autograders, meaning it's a hardcoded, did the student complete the code? It's functioning. It meets all of the requirements, whether it's code comments or you had to use a loop or you had to use a variable with a specific name. So, we have those hard-coded autograders, and those are meant to allow your students instantaneous feedback about their code and their progress and their learning, but also give them lots of opportunities of practice, right? Like they can get through, usually there's two or three coding opportunities per lesson, sometimes more. So, we want to give students lots of opportunities for practice without overwhelming you, the teacher. So, that's where those autograders come in. And, you know, we're automatically providing feedback: yes, this is passing the test cases; yes, this is correctly built with the function names and the variable names that were expected. And so that's autograders. Everybody has access to those.

Pro-licensed teachers also have access to fast grade and AI fast grading. So let's do a quick tour. They look about the same. You will see the student code that you need to grade on one side. You will see the solution code on the other. And you will see an area where you can provide feedback, assign some points, and send it back to the student. Ah, here are these colors again, remember? So, we were talking about the pink is where you can send work back to students for some additional work. Green would be you the teacher finalizing the grades and teal, the teal color comes to the student when that grade has been finalized. So, here I can see that this student code matches the solution code. Pretty simple problem to solve here. So, I can say, "Yep, let's give this a 10 out of 10 and finalize this grade." Now, here we have one that's a little more complicated. And sometimes it's not code at all. Sometimes it is a reflection question where students were supposed to consider cybersecurity strong passwords and discuss what they learned, how can they protect their passwords? And so, sometimes it's not even code. In that case, we can use the AI grading. And I'm going to move to a different course so I can give you a good demo of this AI grader.

So with AI grading, I can see I have 20 assignments to grade. And what the AI grader is going to do, I was just talking about examples that aren't even code. Here we have plain English, an algorithm for brushing your teeth. And so what the AI grading is going to do is it's going to take the assignment description. The AI is going to consider the solution, the canonical solution, and it's going to consider the rubric that you can see here in the bottom right corner. And it's going to suggest a grade for this student work. Now, we firmly believe that grading is a practice that needs to be finalized by an educator, right? Like you are the expert for your students and their learning. So, this is not going to automatically pass back to the students. Your input is needed. And I think that's really important. So, we have a suggested grade. We can see this rubric. Excuse me. We can see this rubric. And you know, maybe I don't agree with the AI because it's not perfect all the time. I can actually watch this score here. Right now it's five out of five because all these checks are green. I can say, "Well, no, I don't think these steps are broken down quite enough to my liking." If I click this, if I disagree with the AI suggestion, then it brings the score down to a 3.3 out of five. So, Adriana, how do you find the AI grading? Has it worked out pretty well for you?

Yeah. I mean, because I do it after I taught the lesson, some of the times if I know that the students got it or it's a topic that is very easy, to be honest, I don't even take the time. I just let it give me the points and I can see if they just started or I can talk to the student and say, "Hey, you started but didn't finish," and things like that. But if it's a lesson that I know was a little bit more challenging, then I use my, even when they all have fives or whatever, I go manually and I go through it. So once more, there is another great thing that the website has that is very flexible: I can use both, I can use AI grading and say yeah this is okay and, if I remember correctly, I think that in the AI there is a feature where it says leave a comment, so that even gives them feedback. So, it depends on the topic, but it saves a lot of time for teachers.

That's music to my ears for sure. Well, I'm going to do a last call for questions. We have just about two minutes left and we've had our attendees with us for 90 minutes. Some great questions coming through the chat. We'll give you one last opportunity to ask Adriana questions while I work through some wrap-up activities. Adriana, we timed this perfectly. The only thing we didn't get to was academic integrity. So, I'm going to put a link to a knowledge-base article in the chat and folks in the audience, you can take some time to look at that if you want after we wrap up here. So please remember that you do have access to the knowledge base where you can search for anything that we discussed today. You can also contact support. We have a fantastic support team. A human is generally responding to your question within half an hour or so. So if you find a broken link in a lesson, if you want some advice about picking a course, please reach out. Our team is happy to answer questions and make sure you get what you need.

CodeHS micro-credentials, if you're interested in showing your growth as a CS educator, you can check out our micro-credentials. We do also have a Facebook group for teachers that's pretty active and some great ideas passed back and forth there on social media. So we would love to know how we did today. This was our first time doing this expert panelist style of webinar. We would love to know if you enjoyed it and found it valuable. And so I'm going to put a link to a survey here. We'd very much appreciate if you would take a minute to fill out that survey. Let me see this last question: It appears that there are ways to disable the videos from the student view. Couldn't find a place to disable presentations. Yes. So, with a pro license, we have a switch you can flip in the settings to turn off videos for students. So, you can find that in the settings tab of, I believe, courses. It's the course settings you'll want to go to to turn off those videos if you have a pro license.

All right. So, please fill out that survey and then of course we want to get you a certificate of completion. We appreciate your time. We know that you are busy and 90 minutes is a lot of time to invest of your day. Thank you all so much for being here. We appreciate it very much, all the great questions that have come through and the participation today. If you would like to learn more about a specific course or coding language, we do have a full series of webinars this summer: teaching web design and development, teaching JavaScript, AP CSA deep dive, teaching Python, AP CSP, and then I mentioned that big AP new course cybersecurity. Well, we have a preview coming up. So, if you want to sign up for more with CodeHS, please feel free to at the link I just put in the chat. If you would like to learn more about bringing CodeHS Pro to your district, you can also contact us. And Adriana, thank you so much. Your advice and stories are just so valuable and I appreciate your perspective fresh from the classroom. Have a great summer, everyone. Thank you. Bye.