New Year, New Updates: Custom Tournaments, Latest Lesson Slides, & More!

Angelica Telnik -

This year we made it our resolution to bring you new features and better improvements so that both you and your class can enjoy all CodeCombat has to offer! So, starting this year off, we want to share with you some of our most recent product updates, and don’t forget you can now stay on top of all the new changes happening with our Changelog.

Create Your Own Esports Tournament

Teachers with the esports product can now create their own personal AI League tournaments! Create a fun and competitive esports experience for your class as they put their coding skills to the test. Click the "create custom tournament" button on the esports page to get started.

To create a tournament, select a team to manage the participants and set the startTime and endTime. Our CodeCombat team will then calculate a resultTime (when the results are available). Once the tournament ends, the player's code will freeze along with the final results (leaderboard). From then on, the leaderboard will remain stable for review with the class.

Engaging New Lesson Slides and Lesson Plans for CodeCombat

As part of our constant curriculum development process, we’re bringing teachers some improvements to the CS1-CS4 curriculum. Teachers can now access the new accompanying lesson slides and lesson plans for each of these CS courses:

  • Lesson plans show teachers how they can implement lesson slides in their classrooms. Additionally, the first page highlights essential resources they may need.
  • Lesson slides are turnkey and student-facing slides that teachers can use to introduce/reinforce coding concepts. The included speaker notes also contain talking points for each slide.

Teachers can find this new curriculum in two locations:

  • Course Guide: In the teacher dashboard, go to the "Course Guide" tab. Under each computer science course, you'll now find buttons that lead you to lesson plans and lesson slides.
  • Teacher Toolkit: In the teacher dashboard, go to the "Teacher Toolkit" tab. Then go to the "Curriculum" section to find links to our new curriculum.

A final addition is that CS1-CS4 now contains capstone projects at the end of each course where students get to explore coding in a more professional platform called repl.it. It is a free and more open-ended platform that helps students practice the coding concepts they've learned in CodeCombat.

Our team is currently developing and working on creating more lesson slides and lesson plans for our other courses, so keep a lookout for more updates this year!

Ozaria Chapter 1 Feedback Empowered Revisions

We've received feedback from multiple teachers that some of the levels in Chapter 1 of Ozaria are too long or a little challenging. To address these concerns, we've removed the following levels from Chapter 1:

  • Stair Ye Well
  • In the Spirit Lands
  • Step Lively
  • Repetition Inquisition

We have also simplified and revised a few levels that caused student struggles in the past:

  • Spirited Away
  • Crystal Clear

Additionally, Chapter 1 Lesson Slides have been updated to reflect these changes. There are a few more improvements/revisions currently in the pipeline, which will be announced once they go live. Please let us know if you encounter any inconsistencies while playing Chapter 1 by reaching out to us at support@codecombat.com. We appreciate your feedback and support!

Always Improving

Thank you for joining us on this journey to review our latest features and improvements! As always, we welcome your questions and feedback. Feel free to email us at schoools@codecombat.com.

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If you are an educator looking for solutions to your computer science needs, request a quote or demo today to be directly connected to our team!