Teaching preparations

For teachers

You can prepare your classes at the For Teachers page. On this page you'll find everything you'll need to teach with Hedy, like your classes, your adventures and slides. All the functionalities of the for teachers page are explained below.

Creating a Class

As a teacher, you can create a class for your students. In this class you can see the students' accounts and their programs and you could monitor their progress. This video shows you how to quickly create a class in Hedy.

Duplicate a class

Are you teaching multiple classes? Then you don't have to customize each class individually. Simply make a class, costumize the class (see "Customize your Class" to learn how) and then duplicate this class as many times as you want. You can duplicate the class on the 'For Teachers' page. If you duplicate a class, all the class settings are duplicated as well. This means that all the levels and adventures you've made unavailable for the first class will now be unavailable for the new class(es) as well. The student accounts and second teacher accounts in your class will not be duplicated into the new class.

Add a second teacher

Are you not the only teacher that teaches your class? Then you can now add another teacher to the class. Go to the 'For teachers' page and click on the class. Then choose 'Invite a teacher' and fill in the username of your colleague. Your colleague will get an invitation on their account to join your class. They can see that invitation message by clicking on their username in the upper right corner of the screen and selecting 'My account'. Once the other teacher accepts the invitation they can customize the class as well. To remove a second teacher from your class, go to the class page and remove the second teacher. The teacher who's created the class cannot be removed.

Customize your Class

You can customize your class and choose which adventures are available for your students. This way your students won't be overwhelmed by the amount of adventures and levels, and they can specifically focus on the adventures you'd like them to practice with. Click on your class on the for teachers page and choose 'customize class'. On this page you can select levels, set opening dates, unlock level thresholds and more.

Select and order adventures In this section you can select and order adventures. The pink tabs are adventures with new commands. The gray tabs are regular adventures. To rearrange the order of the adventures, you can drag the tabs. However, we do advise you to use the regular order of adventures as the Hedy team made sure the adventures go from easiest to hardest. If you want to remove an adventure for your students, simply click the cross on the adventure's tab. If you want to add adventures, for instance your own adventure or an adventure you accidentally removed, use this menu to add the adventure to your students' adventures. Simply click the adventure you want to add and it (re)appears in the line of adventures. To undo all your changes to the adventures, click 'Reset'.

Opening dates With this feature you can set opening dates for the levels. This way you can make a lesson plan before your course begins and not worry about opening new levels each week. In the image above the first level is opened directly, the second will open the 23th of september, and the 3rd level the week after. The other levels are closed. Don't want to set opening dates? No problem, just leave this section blank.

Unlock level thresholds This featue allows you to set a threshold for your students' quiz grade, before they can continue to the next level. For example, if you enter "80" your students have to score at least 80% on the quiz before they are allowed to go to the next level. If they haven't met the threshold, they are not allowed to continue and have to retake the quiz. Don't want to use the threshold? No worries, just keep this section blank.

Other settings There are some other setting that could be useful to you as well. Our first extra setting is 'Mandatory developer's mode'. In developers mode the students only see their input and output screens and the run button. The adventures are hidden and there are no cheatsheets available. This might come in handy in a test situation. If this option is not selected the developer's mode is available for students too as a voluntary option.

If you want all your students to be visible in de class highscore, you can select the second option. With all the other options you can choose to hide some functions or content for your students, this might help them focus more.

Save Don't forget to save your changes when you're done customizing your class.

Student Accounts

To add students to your class go to the class page by clicking in the class name on the 'for teachers' page. Then click 'add students'. There are 2 ways to let your students join your class: You can create accounts for them, or they could create their own accounts.

You create accounts for your students The easiest way to add students to your class is by creating an account for them. This can be done by clicking the 'create student accounts' button and filling in the usernames and passwords for them. The students can login with the username and password that you chose. Afterwards, they can change their username or password if they'd like and they'll still remain in your class. This video shows how to add students to your class in the quickest and easiest way.

Students make their own accounts Your students can also go to the Hedy website and create their own accounts, just like you did. To get them into your class, they simply have to click the invite link. You can find the invite link on the class page and send it to your students. Mind that your students have to be logged in to Hedy when they click the link, in order to make it work smoothly. You can also manually invite a student to your class with the button 'Invite by username'.

Setting preferred language

When students create profiles they are supposed to choose a 'preferred language'. Hedy will always be loaded in this selected language. Changing this language can always be done later on by navigating to 'My account' and 'My personal settings' again.

For non-English speakers Not only can you change the language of the adventures to your own language. You can also choose which language the keywords (for example 'print' or 'ask') should be in. This way you can teach your students to code with English keywords, but you can also let them program in their own language. For example, Dutch students can use the command 'vraag' instead of 'ask'. If a student wants to switch languages, they can click the keyword switcher. It will switch the keywords from English to the preferred language and back. Fun fact! Students are allowed program in both English and their own language at the same time! So, if they have trouble remembering some keywords in English, but easily remember other ones they can use both at the same time.

Video This video show you how to set a preferred language and change the keywords to you preferred language as well.

Storing programs

When you are logged in, you'll see My programs next to your profile icon. This option exists for your students too. In My programs you can find all the programs that you've worked on. By default, programs will be saved to 'My programs' when you run the code, and every 10 seconds, under their default name and their level (for example: Story 5). If you want to store a program under a new name, just type the new name in the name bar. Currently, only one program can be saved per level, per tab.

You (and your students) can also share programs using the share button next to program names. These programs will be posted on our explore page, for everybody to see and use. If you want to unshare your program, go to 'My programs' and click 'Unshare'.

The paper plane icon can be used to hand in programs to the teacher of a class. Programs that have been handed is will no longer be editable.