Firstly, I have to say, I love this site, the game is perfectly paced and is great for learning Python.
I’m a high school computing teacher and used this to teach the basics of Python and would love for them to continue through the game to learn other key concepts like Ifs and variables.
The problem I have is that my students didn’t sign up so their progress wont have been saved. They would need to get through the first few levels to recover their progress before they are able to get any further.
Is it possible for me to start them on a specific level, input a code or something to unlock the first 6 levels or so?
Note: I am not part of the developer-team, so I am not informed about any plans.
Short answer: No, that’s not possible. The account is there to actually save the progress, son no saving without a medium.
Long answer: Maybe. Of course you could communicate with a team-member to give you access to some accounts which have everything till Forest (for example) unlocked. Also the possibility for level-codes is theoretically thinkable. I of course don’t know this, but I doubt the priority is pretty high for that. Your best chance is to talk to Nick, which I’ll invite to this topic. Most likely you will have to do an agreement with him directly.
Honestly, if you are only talking about 6 levels, I’d just have them redo the levels for practice. 6 levels shouldn’t take more than a few minutes if the students have already done them. The students will want the gems from the earlier levels in order to buy gear anyway.
Just my 2 cents.
Now I can see how as a teacher it might be nice to be able to have all levels unlocked so you could pull up any level that students are struggling on, but then again, the teacher should probably run through all the levels first anyway.
It’s not super easy, because even though they can start on a specific level, without the gems and items from the earlier levels, the pacing would be messed up and they’d be missing a few of the items they need.
We could build something like this if you wanted to support us and purchase a group license for your classes, though.
That’s a shame, I may end up making various accounts for the students myself and getting them to level 6/7. Otherwise we will probably end up scrapping this in favour of more traditional means.
We wouldn’t be against purchasing a license, but so far we’ve only taught one class using this site and we only with a weaker classes to get some more engagement rather than for the stronger classes that use IDLE from the get go. Where are the prices and such like for group licensing?
In terms of getting the class to redo this, it will probably be quite demoralising, the computers are a little slow so even loading up and completing each level will be difficult and they are still very new to coding so some may not even manage to catch up to where they were last week.
What would be ideal is if I could get all the students to sign in with my account - I have completed a bunch of levels so I could pinpoint which levels I’d like them to give a go with and there wouldn’t be the issue of them not having the right gear of gems to continue. I would also be able set different students different levels to complete.
You can clear from Level 1 to late forest in under 45 minutes of focused coding. I’ve timed it. On multiple accounts. Especially with Python.
And as others have said, people going through those first levels will enhance their programming abilities, since it will re-teach them the basics. It’s great practice.
And sign-up is super easy. The system doesn’t actually check emails (as in send out an email to the email address), so you could even run them all off the same ‘main’ email address, and just do " Student1+youremail@address.com " for example, and the system will recognize it.
Alternatively, following my previous suggestion, you could make the "Student1+youremail@address.com" logins, then YOU clear from level 1 up to Forest on each account. It’d give you more practice of the basics, and it wouldn’t take long. Not more than a few hours at max, if you’re reprogramming each level by hand. If you wanted to speed it up faster (as a good programmer will do), you can simply just copy the successful scripts for each completed level into a document file, and paste them into the editor for each new account, each time you go through the levels on a new account. You could blow through level 1 - Siege in less than 10 mins on an account, if you’d have the code for each level. Probably faster. You’d only be limited by how fast you can copy & paste, and how fast your computer loads the levels
Rytrik, that’s easy for you to say, hehe! It takes a lot longer than 45 minutes if the computers are slow to load, unfortunately–it’s pretty resource-intensive. And for newbies, it takes longer than that to just type everything out, let alone solve the levels again.
@wired If the students signed in with your account, when they went to do a level, they’d see your solution for it (or that of whichever student last played it).
The group discount would depend on how many student accounts and how long you wanted them for. If we were to do multiple classes’ worth of students for, say, a semester, we could discount down to a small fraction of the normal subscription prices. You can email nick@codecombat.com if that might be interesting with details on how many students you might want this for.
@nick - For the students education, to open up levels for quicker access by the students, I’d be willing to copy and paste the solution code for each level to his student accounts, from my own Desert+ account, to help @wired fast forward his students’ accounts to that point. I know how powerful this game/training system is. I want to see these kids have access to the necessary resources to be able to learn to code… even on slow systems
Or if he’s just working with the first 10 levels, and needs them rapidly opened up, I’d totally be willing to help out
That is, if this is a solution that all parties would want to explore (including your feedback on this offering, @nick)
Can’t all (non-subscription) levels actually be accessed by just typing in the link of the level? The student would be missing out on gems and possibly equipment still, but they could access the level.
I do agree though that for a student to replay the levels they would be gaining more practice. Of course, my school has very fast computers and internet, so the loading time isn’t a big issue.
On a side note, it would be cool if a teacher could have an account that allows them to see student progress and code as well. I’m sure the site would need some updates before this could happen, but it would be cool.
I’ve tried using the links, but you need to have gear in order to play the different levels, in order to get said gear you need gems. Realistically I would need to create 30 different accounts and let them play, each pupil I test this on, will need their own account too.
I can show them solutions, but it will still be something that becomes time prohibitive. We would certainly look at paying for the service, but right now we feel that the game is a little too intensive for some of our machines (10 mins plus to load a level on a couple of machines) plus we need to be able to test this with a few classes and over time before we would make the jump - it’s a very different way to teach python. I may end up giving it a miss for now and try it on another class a bit later in the year
I did offer to help you out, if you’re teaching Python. Even though my time schedule is super occupied from now till Feb 22nd, my offer does still stand, which would accelerate the process significantly, especially with 2 people going at completion (using c&p’d code). Even if it’s until mid-forest.
Especially with Python.