Start Your First Year Teaching with CodeHS

All right. Hello and welcome everybody. Thank you for spending some time with us today. We are super excited you all are here. We'll go ahead and jump right into it because I know it's just an hour and we got so much awesome information for you today. We want to make sure you get all of it. So feel free if you want to introduce yourself in the chat, say where you're logging in from. Feel free to do that. We do have a Q&A that I'll highlight earlier for when we have questions in the chat. We can kind of keep fun vibes going, but if you want to introduce yourself in the chat, feel free. I am going to go ahead and drop the link to the slide deck in the chat. It's also at the bottom of my window here, but I will put that there. So, the slide deck should be there. You should be able to view and follow along. We're going to get through a lot of what's in that slide deck, but if there's anything we don't get to, you'll be able to reference that later.

Welcome, Lawrence. I taught in DC for many years, so excited you joined us here. I'm based in Houston now. My name is Steve. I guess I can segue into my introduction there. My name is Steve. I'm a PD specialist with CodeHS. I am based in Houston. I have been here for about a year and a half, but before coming here I did teach with CodeHS in my classroom. I taught computer science for 11 years, used CodeHS for seven of those years, so I taught everything from sixth grade up to AP CSA and know what you all are going through starting your first year teaching with CodeHS. So we're super happy you're all here. We are going to go till 4:30 central time. So again, the slides are in the chat. Feel free to introduce yourself, and we'll go ahead and get started by introducing our star of the show today, one of our teacher trainers, Tammy. So, welcome Tammy.

Hello. Nice to meet you all. I am Tammy Huddle, and I've been a teacher trainer maybe three years, four years. I've been using CodeHS probably about six or seven years, and I am a virtual teacher in South Carolina. So I teach fully virtually and absolutely love CodeHS.

Awesome. Tammy has a wealth of expertise and experience with CodeHS that I'm excited for you all to hear from today. Also behind the scenes, my colleague Kristen is here. She will be in the Q&A. So, if you have any questions, feel free to use the Q&A feature to ask questions. We'll be going through a lot of information, showing you a lot of cool features. Tammy's going to share a lot of her tips from using CodeHS with her students right now. But if you do have any questions, the Q&A is a great place to put them. Kristen will be monitoring that and answering you there. Feel free to keep the chat available for sharing good vibes, connecting, and anything that's said. I love the introductions in there. We've got such an awesome range of where people are logging in from. So, super excited you all are here. Thank you for joining us. We'll go ahead and get started with the main sequence of events here.

The slides link is in the chat, but you can get to it at codehs.com/firstyear-slides. We're going to cover three main things with Tammy sharing a lot of tips in between as we go. Tammy's going to share tips the whole time. These are the main buckets of info we're going to be covering: we'll talk about how to create courses and sections and also do a little modifications to the courses, we'll talk about what it looks like from the student perspective, and we'll cover teacher tools and resources as well. Most of what we're going to show you is available on the free version. If we ever highlight a pro tool, we'll make sure we mention that this is a pro feature. You may have seen a little bit of this. I know some of you have probably already started school, while some of you are starting in the next week or so. So, we may cover a few things that you've seen already or have clicked on. But our goal is sharing Tammy's expertise from doing this in the classroom. Kristen and I have used this in the classroom as well. Hopefully, even if it's something you've already learned before, you learn something new about how you can do it. Feel free to share any of those observations in the chat as well, because we can all learn from each other as well.

You will be getting a certificate emailed to you after the session. You don't need to do anything; just by being in the Zoom, you're eligible for that. Live attendance is required though. I don't think we have any AI notetakers, but if you do bring an AI notetaker in, just make sure that it's muted and that the chat's disabled for them. Otherwise, we'll go ahead and get started. Like I highlighted, the Q&A is a great place to put questions. Kristen will be monitoring that. If there's any questions that you have for Tammy or myself that you want us to answer out loud, you can put that in there, too, and we'll be taking breaks to check that. Again, if you have any awesome observations to share that connect to anything we're showing, feel free to use the chat to spread some good vibes, share your takeaways from starting your year with CodeHS, and we'll go ahead and get started.

I will put this link in, and I am going to ask everyone to at least sign into CodeHS. But if you have never made a CodeHS account, welcome. We are so glad you joined us. That link that I just dropped into the chat will allow you to make an account. If you already have a CodeHS account, feel free to log in. That'll get us set up for when we start exploring the platform together.

While anyone makes an account who needs to get logged in, just to review what CodeHS is and maybe something you didn't know: we are a comprehensive platform for teaching computer science. We do have elementary, middle, and high school curriculum. On CodeHS, the platform that I believe you all have your accounts on, it's middle and high school, but we do have a CodeHS curriculum for K-5 as well. If you know any elementary teachers or your school has elementary, it is a great platform with a lot of block-based programming that you can bring there. But we're going to focus on the middle and high school courses in this webinar. Everything is online and web-based; you don't need any additional technology, and everything works in the browser. We do have some courses that use Unity or Roblox where you would need that software, but for the most part, all of our assignments and everything are done right on our platform. We have online and offline professional development. You all know that because you're here at one of the online PD events right now, but we'll highlight at the end of the webinar how you can see future upcoming free PD events as well.

What we really want to make sure we cover today, especially if you haven't explored it too much, is that everything you need is on the platform. We've got ways to do feedback and assignment submission, as well as grading and tracking tools both on the free version and the pro version that we're excited to show you. So again, we will dive right into this webinar. Most of what we're going to show you is going to be available on the free version, and if we ever do highlight a pro tool, we'll make sure we highlight that.

We will start, before we dive into actually showing a few things, with a few lightning round Q&As for Tammy to get us started. We've got four quick questions. Tammy's going to give us her answers, and we'll learn from all the awesome stuff she does in the classroom. So Tammy, ready for the lightning round?

I am.

All right. So the topic of this webinar is starting your first year teaching with CodeHS. Feel free to think back on your own first year teaching with CodeHS or teaching computer science. What would you tell your first-year self on that first day of school?

Basically, I think for me it's to not get overwhelmed with all of the things that CodeHS has, and it's growing more every year. All the different things that you can use it for, like AI grading that's been added, Quiz Buzz that's been added, Question of the Day—I use those things now, but there's just so much on the platform. As a first-year teacher, I think the best thing to do is just take it easy, use the curriculum as it is, and add things and take away things as time goes instead of trying to do it all at one time.

Yeah, that's really good advice. I used CodeHS in my classroom for seven years, I've been here for two years, and this is my ninth back-to-school with CodeHS. There's a lot that got added to the platform, but that's a great point. One of my favorite things about CodeHS when I used it is that there's a lot of tools for every possible workflow, but your workflow doesn't have to use every possible tool. There are a lot of different ways for you to figure out what's going to work for you and kind of use that as you go into the classroom, and then kind of add things in as you get comfortable with the new content and platform. So yeah, great advice to start it off.

Next question is: what's the one resource that saved you the most time in year one?

I would say my rep. That's probably because that was my go-to if I ever had a question, and she would always lead me to the knowledge base. That was the next thing that I wrote down. We have a huge knowledge base of articles and how-to guides, including things for the students and things for us as teachers. Most of the time when I would ask, she would always answer my question, but she would always direct me to the knowledge base. So, I really think that's where I learned the most.

Yeah, that's a great point. I think I did not realize the knowledge base existed until my sixth year of teaching with CodeHS, and I was like, "This is incredible." To show you where it is, down here on the left, the very last item at the bottom under Support, you'll see Knowledge Base. If you click it, it's going to bring you to a whole database of articles and answers for everything on the CodeHS platform. What I always like telling teachers is that this is a great thing to show first because it's a great takeaway from this webinar. Pretty much anytime you ask a question, somebody has thought of it before and it is in here. For example, if I was asking, "How do I detect plagiarism?", you'll see these are all different articles that I can click to that are going to go over ways to do that on the platform. What I love about these is there's screenshots, and you'll usually find some videos, like an overview video down at the bottom. So yeah, definitely recommend the Knowledge Base as a great thing to mention. If you have any questions, it's a great place to go and just search your question and see what pops up.

As Tammy mentioned also, if you are with Pro, you have a Customer Success Manager on your account who is a person you can reach out to. But even if you're using Free, under Support, there is the Support Center. Anytime you want to get in touch with our team, if you press Contact Us, it brings up the support window where you can message a member of the CodeHS team directly. It goes directly to our support team and they'll make sure it gets connected with where it needs to be. You can even see how the platform is doing—whole systems operational, it's looking great right now. You can also get to that anytime you see this bubble down here in the bottom right-hand corner. So yeah, great things to highlight right off the bat. Those are two places you can go to to find help right there in the moment. We added a new tool with Pro that is another new feature to get, but those are two that are just out there for everyone right now.

All right, good start to the lightning round. What's one thing you got wrong your first year that now you do completely differently?

I would say trying to do all of the things in the curriculum and not modifying it. Now I'm like a modify queen. I rearrange things, I remove content, I've added some of my own content, and used alternate exercises. Just customize it to yourself. The first year, I basically just used it as is. That's fine, especially if you're feeling overwhelmed; you don't need to do all that. But now I feel comfortable removing things. If you delete, say, an assignment, it's very easy to get it back—really easy. You can restore it. You can go to the deleted things and just restore it back. So don't be afraid to customize it. When I first started, I didn't really do a lot of that, but now I try to make it more my own.

Yeah, that was something I learned a lot as I got through using CodeHS. I was like, "Okay cool, I now feel like I have the confidence to make a decision like I want to try this assignment first, or we're going to do this exercise all together so I'm going to move it ahead, or we just had a fire drill so now I have 30 less minutes in class, how do I want to modify this lesson?" It is really easy to rearrange the assignments in our curriculum. When we look at the assignment structure here shortly when we get on the platform, we'll make sure we highlight that, because it is a really cool feature of the CodeHS curriculum. We give you a lot of the tools to use right away and give you a lot of assignments, but it is something you can change and modify for your specific situations and students. So yeah, definitely something I appreciated when I taught as well.

All right, I think we got one more question in this lightning round before we start doing a few things on the platform. What's one misconception that you think new computer science teachers have?

That they can't learn computer science, or that it's hard. Unless you're jumping into Java and teaching that course, which is a little harder, teaching the basics in JavaScript and Python—you can learn it. You can teach the students, so you can obviously learn it. I actually came as a programmer, so for me to be teaching coding was one thing because I do have that background, but I've known teachers that started teaching coding without any kind of coding in the past, and they picked up on it. It's easy to learn.

Yeah, I will say both myself and Kristen, my colleague in the Q&A, were both English teachers before we switched over to coding. I taught web design my first year. Every kid that I had in web design I had previously taught in English class before, so I was like, "All right, we're learning this now." CodeHS makes it extremely easy to transition. As Kristen mentioned, I definitely needed to remind myself like you just said: you can learn this, you can do it. It was okay to tell myself it was fine to only be a few lessons ahead of the kids when I was learning at first. You don't have to know everything right away. It's really an advantage if you're learning it for the first time because you just went through the process of learning it and acquiring that knowledge. If you learn it, you can teach it. If you can figure this out, you can teach it. Whatever strategies you use to get that knowledge in your brain is an extremely valuable thing to have when you're going and communicating it to students. That was my first year—I was like, "All right, I'm going to figure out this concept and we'll teach it, and then I'll worry about what comes next." Sometimes kids ask questions and I was like, "I don't know, what do you think the answer is to that? Let me look this up real quick." It was a fun experience. CodeHS makes it a very easy transition. Everything is there for you: you have lesson plans, videos, examples, exercises, and solutions. You're going to be just fine, and it's going to be a great year. I switched to computer science back in 2014 and I've not looked back. So for any of you transitioning to computer science, you're going to love it, and hopefully you have a lovely 13 years of computer science education in store for you like I did.

Cool. Great lightning round, we covered a lot. Thank you for the answers there. What we'll do now is intersperse looking at some platform features with some Q&A for Tammy as well. So if anything comes up that you're wondering, again, you can use the Q&A or feel free to share anything you're connecting to in the chat as well.

I did want to highlight our course catalog. You may have seen this already, especially if you have already started teaching, but you have access on both Free and Pro to our entire course catalog. There is a link in the slides for how you can get there, but I want to show you the easiest way to keep getting back there. On the left-hand side under Curriculum, you'll see Course Catalog. Feel free to go over and click that with me. This is going to bring you to every single thing in our course catalog. So if you already have the course you're teaching, this will be a great opportunity to browse and pick out a few more courses, or just see what else is out there. If you've not picked a course yet, we wanted to highlight that process and where you can find it.

When you're in the course catalog, you can filter by new courses, AP courses, JavaScript, Python, or quick activities and projects like our Hour of Code modules that you can assign to your course or add a version of. We have Game Design, AI courses, and courses specifically aligned to state standards. As you start searching by a state—I'm in Houston, so I'll do Texas—we can see the different Texas courses that I could assign that are already mapped to my state standards. You also can filter by time frame: year, semester, quarter, unit, Hour of Code, or month.

Feel free to browse for a bit. What I want to highlight is when you're in the course catalog, you can click Explore and it'll let you dive into the course a little deeper. You'll be able to view a syllabus from here that'll help you with your pacing. You'll be able to see materials and click to see the lesson plans from it. If you click Learn More up here, you can actually explore the course and see what some of the assignments look like before you assign it. If I'm in this Intro to Computer Science in JavaScript course and I want to see what the Programming with Karel unit is all about, I can click Preview and actually click through a few of the lessons and browse them on my own. If I really like it and know my students want to do a little bit more with animation and games, I can even click Assign and just assign one individual unit as well, which is a really cool feature.

That's where you can find all of our courses. Again, you have access to our entire catalog on the free plan, so anything you're looking for, you can find it. I definitely recommend pulling out some of these units. One of my favorites, for instance, was adding the Virtual Reality course onto my Intro to Computer Science course, which I did with a coding club as well. So if you have an extracurricular activity, you can use our course catalog to really easily build a coding club. I always had them do the Virtual Reality unit and they loved it.

When you're picking a course, focus on filtering by goals, difficulty, topics, timing, and standards. But I wanted to show you something new we added over the summer: on the left-hand side, you should see Ask AI. I'll briefly demo this because I want to get into a lot of the other tools. Similar to how Tammy said the Knowledge Base and Support Center were great tools to reach out to, Ask AI is a new feature where you basically have your own Karel AI assistant. You can ask a question like, "What would be a good course for ninth grade students new to programming?" You have different personas you can use when you're searching: General, Co-teacher, Coach, Data Analyst, Librarian, or Tutor. I'm just going to try the General one. Let's see what comes back. Karel is our dog mascot, if you've never seen Karel before. Karel is going to think and give me some recommendations for my question, and it'll even help me make the course if I want to pick one by showing me the course links. Using this tool is another cool way to browse the course catalog. You also can use it to find additional resources. In another example, I said, "My students are struggling with control flow and logic. Help me find resources that can support." It recommended some tutorials, asked if I wanted to find some additional courses, and when I asked about projects, it went to our project catalog and pulled out some tools I could assign. It can even help you find trends in your students. Again, this is a great tool right up there with the Knowledge Base and Support Center to get quick help and ask a question. Explore these personas, try to use it, and see how you like it. Feel free to throw suggestions on whether it was a good or bad answer, as that helps our model. We built this over the summer as another way to search and get AI assistance while searching our platform. This slide in the deck has more ideas for what Ask AI can do when you reference it later.

All right, Tammy, you're up for another good question. We are pushing 300 courses now, but of all the courses you've used, what's your favorite CodeHS course and why?

When I first thought about this, I thought about the Java class, the AP CSA course, because it's so challenging and my students that took that class were all about programming—that was their passion. But honestly for me, I think the Fundamentals of Computing courses were my favorite when I used to teach that, just because it gave the students a little bit of a taste of programming and a taste of web design, which are two different things. I like the fact that the students learned a little bit about computers, software, and hardware, and then they jumped into programming with Karel. They got to meet Karel for the first time, and then they love Karel forever. Then they got to do a little bit of web design, too. I kind of felt like that course introduced them to two different pathways that they could take in computer science, so that's probably my favorite.

Yeah, I agree. I love the intro courses we have because they start with programming, usually with Karel the dog. They'll learn how to do basic commands, functions, if statements, and loops, getting into fundamental concepts before applying them to larger topics. As Tammy mentioned, courses like Fundamentals of Computing have programming, web design, and even cybersecurity in there. We have another animal mascot, Tracy the Turtle, for Python coding, where students learn by drawing pictures with the turtle. There's a lot of really cool options in there, and even if you don't do an entire course, checking out individual units can be great.

Browse the course catalog, preview anything, and teach yourself. That was one of the fun things I liked doing when I taught CodeHS: if I knew next year my school was going to expand to AP, I could learn what the AP course was all about. You can enroll yourself in a course as a student if you do Preview as Student, complete the modules, and get a head start before deciding to teach it. Highly recommend browsing the course catalog as much as possible.

Tammy, what computer science topics tend to engage your students the most?

Pretty much the ones where they can do the coding and actually get to do stuff. With some topics like cybersecurity, which I'm teaching now too, some topics are a little harder for them because you're watching videos and answering questions, though it has gotten more interactive lately. But they really enjoy being able to actually type the code, run the code, see what it does, and get excited when their program runs. Once they get to the programming part, that's when it gets exciting. For cybersecurity, we just started ciphers and they're loving that—learning all about that through hands-on work.

I was going to mention encryption, ciphers, and binary numbers. They are so fun and challenge students to think. When teaching binary numbers, students feel like they're learning their own little language. I used to find numerical trivia questions—like the world record for the largest snowflake being 15 inches in diameter—and put the answer in binary so students could only figure out the fun fact if they converted the binary number first. Figuring things out is super fun for them, whether it's programming or ciphers. It provides good brain stimulation. We also have artificial intelligence and cybersecurity courses that cover key parts of computer science outside of pure programming.

Now, I want to quickly demo how to create a course and a section, and talk about what courses and sections are before we look at the student view. When you pick a course from the course catalog, it's like choosing a textbook. Sections are the individual class periods that are going to use that textbook. You might pick a course like Web Design and name it "Web Design Honors", but then your sections are the individual class periods using it—like P4 and P7 using Web Design, versus three other periods using Fundamentals of Cybersecurity. Each course only needs to be created once, and then you can use it for as many sections as you have.

To create a course, go to the left-hand side under Courses and press Create New Course. You can choose a course template or start from scratch. I'm going to choose a course template and select Computer Science in JavaScript (Corgi). Give it a name—we recommend keeping something similar to the official course name in your title so our support team and Ask AI can easily locate it if you need help. I'll name this "Intro to Computer Science in JavaScript - Webinar Version" and press Next.

My course is made—it's now a textbook checked out from the library. Once you have the course, you can make a section by pressing Add a Section. Name your section (e.g., "Webinar Period 1") and press Next. You also have the option to import rosters from Google Classroom. If you're a Pro user, district-level integrations with Schoology and Canvas can be set up by having your district admin contact us. I'll create a second section named "Webinar Period 2". If you click Sections on the left-hand side, you can see all your sections.

To have students join a section, give them the class code or invite link found on the section page. They can join at that link and will show up on your section roster, where you can view their progress, change passwords, and manage settings. Under Manage, you can set a student's preferred language; many of our materials, slides, and assignment instructions can be displayed in Spanish. On the Roster page under Student Settings, you can configure options like block usage or copy/paste availability.

Tammy, is there anything unique you do to set up your course at the beginning of the year once your sections are made?

One thing I started doing was moving the quizzes to the very end of the lesson, almost like an exit ticket or check for understanding. Generally, students watch the video and take the quiz right away, but I prefer my students to do some of the work in the module first—like coding and looking at examples—so they have a better understanding before taking the quiz. So I like to move those around.

That is a fantastic tip. On the Assignments page, your curriculum is broken down into modules (units), lessons (class periods), and assignments. Lessons follow a structure of videos, checks for understanding, examples (pre-written code), and autograded exercises. To rearrange items, click the three dots next to any assignment or lesson and select Move Up or Move Down. You can reorder assignments, move quizzes to the end of a lesson, swap lessons, or rearrange entire modules to fit your pacing.

If you click on a lesson plan (available for the first few lessons on Free, and all lessons on Pro), you will find resources like problem guides, extra handouts, pacing guides, discussion questions, modifications, standards, and editable video slides. To add your own custom content or pre-assessments, click Add New Assignment, choose an assignment type like a Quiz, and place it at the beginning of a module.

Now let's look at the IDE (Interactive Development Environment). Switching to Student View shows what students see when navigating a lesson. They watch the video, view the slides, complete the check for understanding, and move to the coding exercise.

The coding IDE consists of three main areas:
1. **Assignment Window (Left):** Displays the instructions, expected output, and Quick Docs.
2. **Code Editor (Center):** Where students write code (e.g., JavaScript, Python, Java) and run it to see Karel or their program execute.
3. **Output/Autograder Window (Right/Bottom):** Shows the execution output. When students run autograder checks, passing code allows them to submit. If they continue without passing all checks, the assignment status remains yellow (opened/unsubmitted) instead of turning green/blue (submitted/completed).

Key features inside the IDE:
- **Docs Tab:** Contains language references, syntax guides, and starter code. It's the best first stop for stuck students or early finishers.
- **More -> History:** Displays student code history timestamped step-by-step. If code was copy-pasted, it is visually highlighted in orange, showing exactly what line was pasted.
- **More -> Solutions:** Allows teachers to view the solution code.
- **Messages:** Enables direct teacher-student communication within the assignment.
- **Grade Tab:** Allows teachers to review code, enter scores, leave feedback, and mark assignments as "Needs Work" (pink status) or finalized.

Tammy, what tools in the IDE do your students find most useful?

The Docs tab, absolutely. They love the Docs tab because it breaks down how to do the coding. I reference it a lot to show them where to find help. They also like running Check Code, but I stress to them that passing Check Code alone doesn't mean the program is completely correct—they still need to verify if it runs correctly and produces the right output.

To grade on a Free account, open a student's submission from your roster or progress view, open the Grade tab on the right side of the IDE, enter a score, type your feedback, and mark it as accepted or "Needs Work". For Canvas or Schoology integrations, your school admin can coordinate with your CodeHS representative to establish district-level integration.

Tammy, do you have any final advice for teachers starting their first year?

Don't get overwhelmed with all that CodeHS has to offer because there are so many features. Start with an existing course, use what's already built for you, and make small changes or modifications as you go without trying to do everything at once. Modify it to whatever feels best for you and your students.

Thank you all for joining us today! You'll receive an email within 48 hours containing the recording, slide deck, and your attendance certificate. Check out codehs.com/freepd for upcoming sessions. Have a wonderful school year!