Many may wonder why after our big Hour of Code event we didn’t have any updates this winter! Well after spending around 6 months building Monster Coding, the first reason is because we were a bit burned out! Participating as a partner in the Hour of Code was exciting, but it also took a ton of work and sacrifice on the part of my family to make it happen. So after the big event I needed to spend some time focusing on the family. At the same time, our 3 year old daughter Catherine was formally diagnosed with Autism. While we had suspected Autism as the cause of her speech delay some months earlier, the actual diagnosis turned out to have a larger impact on all of us than I anticipated. I’ve spent a huge amount of time researching Autism and the different treatment approaches, which I found is a topic where there is little agreement among the experts. We’ve also been working with her every day, as no amount of outside intervention can equal the impact parents and siblings have on a child each day. So it’s only really in the last month that I’ve begun working on Monster Coding and the graphic engine behind it (Kwippe) - finally integrating the Aliens into the graphic engine for Monster, as well as into blocks that can now be used to build lessons with. I added some fun alien backgrounds, as well as an awesome new gradient builder, which gives you a million more interesting ways to color your creations in the Monster Code Lab.

We’ve got a lot planned for the summer! I’ll be rolling out the new lessons shortly, as well as some printable PDF’s for teachers and parents to use for summer activities. Please check our Twitter feed for updates - @monstercoding - as this is the spot where I am most active. You can also subscribe to our newsletter by scrolling to the bottom of the homepage. You may also notice that we updated our interface a bit - I tried to clean things up a bit, and make us slighter sleeker. Not sure if I achieved that or not! But anybody who has been using the app regularly should find that some of the glitches have been fixed as well. If you find an error anywhere, do give us a shout out via our contact us, or FB or Twitter - I try to respond to such reports quickly.

I’m excited to announce our Country Quest page for the 2015 Hour of Code is live! The stats only update once a day right now, but I might be able to get a better data feed, especially during the awesome upcoming Hour of Code December 7 - 13th. I’ve been so crazy busy trying to make last minute updates to the app, like the Certificates feature, as well as enhancements to our front end website, etc. The Country Quest was something I really wanted to do, because I think it tells an incredible story about what is happening with students in other countries right now, and the effect Code.org is having in the world around us. While I know their primary objective has been to promote awareness about the need for Computer Science curriculum in U.S. schools, the Hour of Code has become a global movement for young people to better their lives through education, and specifically through the benefits that Computer Science can bring to them. I was really touched when I read the Thanksgiving blog post by Hadi Partovi, the co-founder of Code.org, where he mentioned that one group of girls in a Middle Eastern country is doing their Hour of Code in secret, so they don’t suffer reprisals. I mean think about that for a moment. What an amazing, amazing thing this man and his organization have done - to hear stories like that, and realize it is all because of the work they have done. To know you are really making change in people’s lives across the globe must be an amazing feeling!

While here at Monster Coding we’re just a tiny piece of this huge movement, we’re keeping a sharp eye on how we can write lessons that will best serve different groups of people, and especially how we can use this event to make connections with people from far away places, both to see what they think of what we’ve put together, as well as to gather fresh ideas for the upcoming year. To say I’m excited about all of this is a huge understatement! I’ve adjusted the Country Quest scores to account for the population of each country, and eliminated the U.S.A. altogether as it didn’t seem necessary to include the country hosting the event, and our own country, where we obviously get most of our traffic from. I was delighted to see that Portugal is currently in the lead! All of those students I saw online from Porto must have made the difference there :) We have a lot of other cool things in the works right now, as well as our upcoming trips to NYC and Seattle, so I’ll try to post again soon.

I finally added the “Solve It For Me” feature to our Hour of Code tutorial, which should be a huge help for students struggling with some of the more complicated activities. I added more extensive analytics today, and was really concerned when I saw how many students seemed to get close to the final activity, only to exit without finishing or getting their certificate from Code.org, which is a cool thing to have! I actually began coding this feature a few weeks back, but got so busy doing other stuff that I didn’t have time to add it. Today it became my top priority when I saw how students are interacting with the app. The button is hidden until the user makes a mistake first, and I offer the warning message asking them to consider reading the instructions again before letting the app solve it for them. I found in my own class that kids ignored the instructions more often than you’d like to think…

I’ve also added tons of kids coding vocabulary cards, as well as tags and search which makes the cards a lot easier to manage. I’m not sure what I’ll do with these in the long run, but they are fun to make and hopefully some teacher somewhere will make use of them! I’ve got a lot more work to do before the Hour of Code, so stay tuned as I’ll try to post any new updates here.

Sorry the blog has been neglected as I worked on our Printable Activities and Teacher’s Guide, as well as troubleshooting things like Firefox. There are still issues in Internet Explorer and Safari, all of which I hope to have resolved as soon as possible, and well before the Hour of Code beginning December 7th. But on to the exciting news! We got word this weekend that Code.org has added us to their Beginning section, near the top of the page here Code.org Tutorials. To say I was delighted is a big understatement. I was ecstatic. While our app has many areas I’d like to improve, our Hour of Code tutorial is the product of countless hours in the last 6 months or so, and a lot of sacrifice from my 3 kids and husband. And as I began communicating with people on Twitter and via email, I saw that while the reception for our app has been very positive, getting users to our site has not been a quick or easy thing. So to get the email letting us know that they thought enough of our work to add it near the top of their page, and to realize how many visitors this might bring, was really quite amazing.

I’ll be writing more about our awsome sponsors at Bowtie.io - who even before we were approved by Code.org had told us they were interested in helping sponsor our Hour of Code, as well as helping get the word out about us. They have an amazing “can do” startup attitude and have an impressive web hosting platform that aims to make development a much easier process for folks. So many great developments lately! I’ve also started a Vocabulary Cards section for our site, where I hope to add all kinds of fun stuff that teachers can download and print. Please stay tuned, and I hope you’ll join us on Facebook or check us out on Twitter, we’d love to hear from you! I’ll also have a contact us form up soon.

Anybody that has read a few entries of this blog knows that I have a passion for the Kindle Fire! I was downright ecstatic when I got the email about the new 50 dollar tablets, as I think this could be a huge help to so many kids who could benefit from the amazing Whispersync technology of books that are audio and highlighting enabled. Plus the thing is a snappy full blown tablet as well, and has enough solid e-learning apps to make it a viable alternative to the expensive iPads. So I’ve been working on optimizing our Mystery Island Coding Quest for the Fire tablets, and hope to be done with that shortly! I tried out Code.org and a Tynker tutorial on the 7 inch Kindle, and they were miserable. The only programming app I could find for the Fire was Lightbot, which is cool, but that just isn’t enough. I know iPad has such huge penetration in schools that Amazon is swimming up a waterfall here, but I sure hope they have a well organized and funded education division that plans on taking them head on! Especially with their 8 inch model, these tablets should be an easy sell if they have the right content.

And I’m just optimistic enough to think that Monster Coding should be one of those apps, so in the meantime I’m going to work away at getting our tutorial to look great on the our 2 Fire tablets. My 8 inch hasn’t arrived yet, but I’ll post screenshots from both when I can. Nothing against iPads either - my kids still use our iPad all the time, and some of those IOS apps are so buttery smooth that you feel like HTML5 is pure hackery. But while that level of smoothness is hard to achieve, technology is getting better, and the new Silk browser is a huge improvement for HTML5 apps. I do hope they bring back the fullscreen option soon though…