Cocrea Classroom is a feature we specifically launched for educators. It integrates closely with Gandi IDE and the Cocrea community to better meet the needs of teachers in educational settings.
Philosophy of Cocrea Classroom
Gandi IDE and Cocrea are inspired by Scratch — a platform whose product philosophy we deeply agree with. It encourages children to express their ideas by remixing others' works through communication and collaboration within the community. Scratch embodies the educational philosophy advocated by the K12 Computer Science Framework and CSTA, especially in fostering computational thinking, creativity, and problem-solving skills, making it an excellent teaching tool.
Some products on the market have already integrated Scratch with teaching scenarios, including Google CS First, Code.org, etc. However, we noticed that teamwork, highly valued by the K12 framework as a best practice, is not reflected in many educational products. Teamwork is crucial for children's growth and development, as it is not only an important social skill but also essential for future learning and career paths. Therefore, we innovated Gandi IDE by integrating teamwork as a core function into the editor, hoping to fill an important gap in CS education.
In the process of communicating with numerous educators, we also identified some other pain points teachers have, such as:
- How to keep students focused on learning programming in class instead of getting distracted by games?
- How to enable students of different programming levels to learn together, especially without discouraging those who are less skilled?
- How to manage students' assignments more effectively and improve teaching efficiency?
We have been exploring better solutions to these problems, aiming to retain the spirit of Scratch in promoting creative expression and collaboration while meeting the specific needs of educators in teaching. Based on continuous communication and experiments, we developed Cocrea Classroom, aiming to provide CS teachers worldwide with a superior teaching tool.
Core Features of Cocrea Classroom
- Complete teaching work on a single platform. Creating classes, inviting students, importing templates from the template library, managing assignments, and students' creative work can all be done on one platform, eliminating the need to switch between multiple systems.
- Team collaboration. Use the editor like Google Doc, where students can work in groups on the same project and submit their work.
- Teacher management features. Allow different teachers to set up classes based on personalized needs and find best practices that fit their teaching scenarios.
Feature Introduction
For Teachers
- Create a class. Find the dropdown menu next to the Cocrea avatar, click on "Classrooms" to go to the class homepage, then click the "Add new class" button at the top right to create a class;
2. Inviting Students Click on the class card to enter the class detail page, click on the "Students" tab at the top to enter the class students detail page, and click the "Invite students" button in the upper right corner to pop up the invitation box. Send the generated invitation link to the students. Students can join the class by clicking on the invitation link.
3. Class Settings Click on the "Settings" tab at the top to enter the class settings page. We provide the option "Hide the explore tab", which, when enabled, prevents class students from seeing the Cocrea explore page.
4. Assigning Homework Click on the class card to enter the class detail page, then click the "Create new" button in the upper right corner to create an assignment. You can set a title, description, and deadline for the assignment.
After clicking save, the assignment will be in 'Draft' status. In the operation column at the far right of the assignment list, clicking the first operation item can change the assignment status from 'Draft' to 'Published'. Class students will receive assignment notifications via email.
The 'COMPLETED' column in the assignment list will display the submission status of the assignment 'Number of Submissions/Number of Students'. Clicking on the data will pop up the assignment detail page, which will show detailed data of students' submissions, including a list of submitted assignments and a list of students who have not submitted. Clicking on the WORK LINK will directly enter the project homepage; 'TEAM MEMBERS' displays the information of students who submitted the assignment, and if the assignment was submitted by a team, a list of team members will be displayed.
- Notification Feature Teachers will receive notifications in the notification bar at the top right corner of the Cocrea website when students join the class or submit assignments.
For Students
- Viewing the Assignment List After clicking on the class card, students enter the class detail page, where they can see the assignments posted by the teacher. Assignments that are past the deadline and have not been submitted will be marked as 'Missing' status, and the 'Turn in' button will be grayed out and unclickable.
- Submitting Assignments Assignments not yet due are marked as 'Assigned' status. Clicking the 'Turn in' button on the far right pops up the assignment submission dialog. In the dialog, students can choose the work they want to submit from their own work library.
After clicking the submit button, the status of the assignment will be updated to 'Turned in' and the link of the submitted work will be displayed.
Another way to submit assignments: The bottom navigation bar on the student's project detail page also has an entry for submitting assignments. After selecting the class and assignment, you can submit, and the effect is consistent with the submission method mentioned above.
Course Resources
For experienced CS teachers, you can directly create your own course templates in Gandi IDE. We offer a vast array of free and copyrighted materials.
For CS teachers who lack experience or are new to the field, we provide course templates, such as:
- Remixed from Google CS First.
- Gandi IDE's proprietary template library, which includes subject-related physics engines and AI-hub integrated with the latest technologies.
About the Facebook Gandi Group
To facilitate communication between CS teachers and the Gandi IDE official team, we have created a Facebook group for Gandi IDE. In addition to serving as a platform for exchange, this group also offers teachers the following services:
- Professional Scratch coaching support. Our team includes members proficient in Scratch programming who will offer code debugging, consultations, and advice to teachers with no or little programming experience;
- Updates on Classroom-related features are synchronized in this group. Teachers can make suggestions for Classroom features and provide feedback on their use in this group, and our developers will offer support;
- The latest information related to CS education, including the sharing of high-quality teaching resources."
