As the end of the school year craziness ramps up and summer break approaches, we wanted to take a moment to share the exciting product updates that we pushed in Q1. Our team has been working hard to improve our products and enhance the user experience. We're excited to announce several new features and updates that we believe will continue to lighten the lift for teachers and engage students in computer science. 

‍

Lesson Activity Generator Powered by AI

Lightening the lift for teachers is a top priority for Skill Struck. Utilizing AI technology, our team has developed a Learning Activity Generator specifically designed to ease the workload of teachers. With this tool, educators can create learning activities in a matter of minutes. By automating this process, teachers can focus on more important tasks, such as interacting with students and providing personalized instruction.

It’s important to remember that AI is not perfect. Using AI tools like our Learning Activity Generator is really great for going from 0% to 50-80% on a project in an instant. This sparks ideas, gets the ball rolling and then the teacher can tweak it to work for their students and add their own personal teacher magic. 

Features about the Activity Generator to be excited about:

• Feeling stumped? Get fresh ideas.
• Generate activities for ALL subjects, not just CS.
• Hit multiple standards with 1 activity (hello cross-curricular!).

Give our lesson plan generator a try and let us know what you think: skillstruck.com/generator.

‍

Launch Pad (K-5) has a new look.

We have given Launch Pad a new interface to help students and teachers navigate the platform easier, while also making it more engaging for our younger students.

This new look encourages engagement and creativity from the students, while also helping them know now to navigate to where they need to be, making it easier on our teachers. 

For the past few months, our teachers have had the choice to keep the original Launch Pad interface or enable this new interface in the Educator Portal. We’ve received a lot of positive feedback on this new interface and are excited to push this new look to all customer accounts starting June 2023. 

New Professional Development Offerings

We are continually working on solutions that help school districts adopt a computer science pathway. While our platforms are easy to use, whether our educators are new to CS or experts, we’ve also added new professional development options as one of these solutions. These PD options include: 

On-Demand PD

• 24/7 access to Skill Struck’s Community Plus, on-demand asynchronous PD lessons and materials.
• Praxis Prep Course (included in Community Plus).

Basic PD 

• 4 virtual synchronous 1-hour lessons for primary or secondary educators.

Premium PD

• 8 virtual synchronous 1-hour lessons for primary or secondary educators. 

Reach out to your area partnership manager to learn more about Skill Struck’s professional development offerings. 

Custom Assessments + Bank

Assessments are a big part of student learning. It helps educators know student comprehension of certain topics. For this purpose, we have developed a way for teachers to import their own questions into custom assessments. They can do this by adding questions individually, or by uploading a file in a CSV format.

Teacher Answer Key Explanations

We’ve made sure that any teacher can teach computer science, whether they’ve had coding experience or not. To continue to empower our teachers, we have added explanations to every answer key in our platform. We made this update so teachers can confidently teach their students why their specific code is right, or wrong. 

Run Code Update 

In Voyage, students will now be required to run their code before they can grade their code and will have a reminder pop-up to run their code before grading it. We made this update to help students interact and engage more in their projects, and learn how developers code in the real world. 

‍

That is a wrap for Q1! It’s important to note that many of these changes and updates come from feedback we receive from our partners. We want to thank all the amazing Skill Struck educators who provide feedback and let us know what can improve and how we can make Skill Struck a better experience for all. We love partnering with amazing educators like you! 

If you’re interested in becoming a Skill Struck partner, reach out to us here.