Across the globe, there is growing talk of the need for the next language we teach our children to be coding or computer programming, perhaps ahead of (but not to the exclusion of) traditional ‘second or third language’ options such as French, Hindi or Mandarin Chinese. Code underpins so many of the products, services and applications we use everyday that a knowledge of the code and computational thinking that created them is becoming indispensable to understanding and operating in the modern world.
Codio was created to take the pain out of teaching coding - to unlock the potential for computer programming in schools and universities worldwide with the most user friendly cloud-based platform for ‘learning by doing’.
We’re constantly inspired by the myriad ways in which Codio is being adopted by teachers and lecturers in schools and universities. We love getting out and meeting with users - and recently we visited Caistor Grammar School in Lincolnshire in the UK - an academy school with a keen focus on innovation and academic excellence - where we met with Thomas Smith, Head of Computing, interviewed many of the computer science students and participated in the classroom with a group new to computer science. It was an inspiring day!
As more and more schools and universities seek to innovate in the way they teach computer science, we’re continuing to build out the education user experience and going forward you’ll see us continue to improve in the following ways:
Being accessible and useful everywhere: Codio is already accessible on any machine, through any browser, in any location. Your coding projects are always there, accessible and each with a dedicated server and any pre-installed software you choose. We’ll also be exploring options to enable working offline.
Easy stack set up: Codio users will soon be able to access a large library of pre-configured software stacks and starter packs with absolutely nothing to install anywhere. Teachers and students can be up and running - and coding - in seconds.
Ease of Use: we’ll be focusing on the user journey and experience around searching for and selecting software stacks and starter packs and making these as simple and as intuitive as possible. You can expect to see the IDE evolve too - with instructional workspaces and rich code editing side by side - so you can focus on content, teaching and enabling students to learn by doing.
Collaboration: many teachers like to share their project workspaces, or ‘broadcast” their code to the classroom. We’ll be enhancing options for the ways in which teachers and students collaborate and interact using Codio.
As you can see there’s a lot more to come to enhance the teaching potential of the Codio platform. We’ll keep you updated and we’re always listening to your feedback and ideas - so please keep sharing these in the forum.
