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Teacher Tutorial #1:
Creating a new class in Code Studio

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Teacher Tutorial #1:
Creating a new class in Code Studio

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Teacher Tutorial #1: Creating a new class in Code Studio

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This brief video demonstrates how to set up your first computer science class in Code Studio. Part 1 of 4. Start learning at http://code.org/ Stay in touch with us!

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Teacher Tutorial #2: Planning
and prepping a Code Studio Lesson 

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Teacher Tutorial #2: Planning
and prepping a Code Studio Lesson 

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Teacher Tutorial #2: Planning and prepping a Code Studio Lesson

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This brief video demonstrates how to use Code Studio to plan and prepare a computer science lesson in your classroom. Part 2 of 4. Start learning at http://code.org/ Stay in touch with us!

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Teacher Tutorial #3: Using Code Studio
with students

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Teacher Tutorial #3: Using Code Studio
with students

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Teacher Tutorial #3: Using Code Studio with students

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This brief video demonstrates how you and your students can use Code Studio to learn computer science during a blended learning class session. Part 3 of 4. Start learning at http://code.org/ Stay in touch with us!

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Teacher Tutorial #4: Viewing student
progress on Code Studio

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Teacher Tutorial #4: Viewing student
progress on Code Studio

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Code.org Teacher Community - The last video in our quick training series covers...

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The last video in our quick training series covers how to assess student progress in Code Studio using the Teacher Dashboard.

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At Code.org, we love encouraging students to explore their creativity and create amazing projects using code. And at the same time, we're big proponents of privacy, so we don't give students access to the tools that allow them to upload their own content unless they are over the age of 13 or are inside a teacher's classroom.

We've now added an additional privacy feature that teachers have been waiting for - the ability for teachers to control exactly which students can or cannot share App Lab, Game Lab, and Web Lab projects. We also made sure that students under the age of 13 default to not being able to share these projects with anyone but their Code.org teachers.

Teachers can manage which students can share these projects through the "Manage Students" section of your teacher dashboard. If you have CS Discoveries or CS Principles assigned to your section, you should see a "Sharing" column. If you don't have these courses assigned, you will be able to show this column through the settings button in the "Actions" column.

To learn more about how to use this setting, check out our support article on this topic.

The US Department of Education just invited applications for the Supporting Effective Educator Development Program (SEED). The notice prioritizes support for K-12 computer science and gives members of the computer science community the opportunity to apply for this funding. It also means that the Department needs peer reviewers with CS knowledge to evaluate grant applications.

The Department has asked the computer science community to help them grow their pool of grant proposal reviewers to include individuals with expertise in computer science education. The Department has never had a focus on computer science before. Having members of the community become peer reviewers gives the field a unique opportunity to be part of the merit-based determination of winning applications.

What kind of people are they looking for? The Education Innovation Research grant program recently said they are looking for:

Persons who are school principals or other school leaders (such as curriculum coordinators or coaching specialists), teachers, district leaders, foundation officers, university faculty (who work with schools), researchers, evaluators, professional development providers, or other individuals who have significant and current K-12 education experience.

Ideally, persons who have administrative, project management, or some other leadership experience which helps them to bridge their understanding of what happens in the classroom with what it takes to implement, sustain, and grow new educational programs.

Persons who are interested in identifying what is new or innovative nationally in K-12 education, and in determining how those innovations can be successfully evaluated, scaled, and disseminated.

Persons who have direct K-12 experience and expertise in at least two of a number of content areas, including STEM, professional development, teacher preparation, vocational education, and program evaluation, among others.

Persons who are excellent writers, good critical thinkers, and committed to completing assigned tasks in a professional and timely manner.

Interested? Good!
The EIR program has asked those interested in reviewing proposals to send a copy of their resume to EIRpeerreview@ed.gov. You can also register and submit your resume in "G5" to be eligible to review EIR, SEED, and any other programs that need computer science expert reviewers. (It is recommended that you consult these PowerPoint instructions.) ED will compensate you for the time you spend reviewing applications.
One note of caution
You won't be able to be a reviewer if you will be applying to the competition, if you'll be involved in the preparation of a grant application, or if you would benefit from an application that would receive funding. The Department has safeguards to prevent these conflicts.
We hope you'll consider this opportunity
ED will be announcing new grant competitions in coming weeks and months, and we want them to have the computer science experts they need to fund the best applications they receive.

This morning between 5:55 and 6:05am and 8:05 and 8:50am PST, part of Code.org's site experienced a slowdown or outage. The root cause of this was an increased error rate in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 service which affected numerous other websites in addition to Code.org. AWS provides more details in their update below.

Students who were logged on before the outage were unable to save their work during the outage. We apologize for the inconvenience to our students and teachers, and we will continue to work hard to ensure Code.org is working great all the time for everyone. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to support@code.org.

It's been a while since we summarized the updates that we've made to our products. Here are some of the most exciting changes that we have released since December! As always, if you have any suggestions or improvements you'd like to see, please email your ideas to support@code.org.

Hiding lessons in CS Fundamentals. Similar to what is already possible in CS Discoveries and CS Principles, you can now also hide lessons in CS Fundamentals, allowing you more control over what students see and work on in your classroom.

Lesson Extras is now turned on by default for new CS Fundamentals Sections! We talked about the Lesson Extras makeover we released in our last product updates blog. This feature gives students the opportunity to expand their knowledge and further practice without getting ahead of their classmates. Now all new sections that use CS Fundamentals A-F or one of the Express courses will have this feature turned on by default. And you can always select to turn this off if you don't want your classroom to use it.

Sign-in Button on Picture Password Page is above the fold. We received reports that young students in classrooms had trouble finding the right "Sign In" button on their picture password page because it was below the fold on small screens. We moved it up to top:

We launched applications for our Middle and High School 2018-19 Professional Learning Program! Applications are still open!

Are you teaching computer science? We're collecting data about what computer science offerings are available in schools across the U.S. So far, we have collected data on tens of thousands of schools, but we need more help! We added a quick survey to teacher accounts who have provided us with their school information. If you see this survey, please take a minute to fill it out and help us track the momentum!

Curious if there are any bills being discussed in your state that affect computer science education? We have a brand new map on the advocacy page that highlights the status of bills our team works on in each state. This map is driven by Tableau and FiscalNote, so it has the most up to date information directly from our advocacy team's data. It's also interactive and fancy so you can browse each bill in each state and get more details on how you can get involved.

The Maker App for CS Discoveries Unit 6. When we first set off on incorporating physical computing into our existing programming tools, the goal was to make setup as painless and seamless as possible. Our first approach to this was to use a feature in the Chrome browser that allowed us to communicate with the boards over USB. While that process worked great through the pilot, unfortunately, Google announced that they were doing away with the technology at some point in 2018 (we still don't have an official date). With no other browser-based options available, we had to switch course and build a standalone Maker App. This app is basically a customized browser that lets us keep connecting to the board over USB, even once Google officially ends support for Chrome apps. You can learn more about the Maker App at studio.code.org/maker/setup

Better Web Lab Preview. Added a maximize button in Web Lab that allows the preview to take up the space of the full editor:

Debug commands are now turned on and working in Game Lab!

You can also now see the sprite collider's bounding box even without using any of the collide functions.

And there is a button in Game Lab that lets you quickly turn on debug mode for all sprites:

Snap crop in Game Lab! Now, you can easily crop an image to fit the content or make a selection for what you want to crop to.

Several fixes in App Lab and Game Lab, including better autocomplete, better copy/paste in design mode, selection of code, and more.

Using an Adafruit, Crystal Reynaga and Angela Johana Garcia Pena developed a GPS connected wristband that paired with a mobile app to help parents monitor their young children. They were featured in La Opinion and Telemundo, two Spanish language news media outlets. And they were also invited to film a segment of Math@Work with the stars of Shark Tank.

Students in Crystal and Angela's classes have developed many mobile apps that have a social impact. One group created an app to help people with hearing impairments communicate with others. Another group programmed an app that helped people keep track of their water usage in order to limit water waste.
Crystal Reynaga and Angela Johana Garcia Pena are students at Florence Nightingale Middle School in Los Angeles, CA.
Learn more about these awards here.

With the help of his teacher, Bonnie Howard, Mason Branum was able to complete and publish the game "Bendy and the Ink Machine." Mason earned $5,000 within the first three weeks of its publishing. Mason is a special education student who was given equal opportunity to participate, resulting in excellence. Through examples and practice, Mason excelled beyond anyone's expectation.

John Mason Branum is a student at Katherine Hankins Middle School in Theodore, AL.
Learn more about these awards here.

The Queen City Robotics Alliance (QCRA) was founded to increase participation STEM and FIRST by more students in Charlotte.

The signature achievement of QCRA is the Zone - a 6000 square foot warehouse space dedicated to area FIRST Robotics teams and inexpensive tech classes like Java. The Zone sustains FIRST teams that otherwise would not exist by providing meeting space and a makerspace workshop for robotics youth. Nationally, the Zone is the only collaborative FIRST Robotics space sustained entirely by teams.

YETI Robotics is an anchor team for QCRA and in 2014, YETI Robotics students decided to go global by partnering with Project 658 to host a coding camp to help the international community in Charlotte. Project 658 provides services for at-risk families in the international and refugee community of Charlotte, helping them develop sustainability. YETI has hosted the coding camp for the past two years with many students coming back for a 2nd year.
The award will be accepted by QCRA founder Lia Schwinghammer. Learn more about these awards here.

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At Code.org, we love encouraging students to explore their creativity and create amazing projects using code. And at the same time, we're big proponents of privacy, so we don't give students access to the tools that allow them to upload their own content unless they are over the age of 13 or are inside a teacher's classroom.

# data[].attributes.headline
How to share a student in Studio.Code.Org

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How to share a student in Studio.Code.Org

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How to share a student in Studio.Code.Org

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This is a short video on how 2 teachers can share a student in Code.org's studio. Created with TechSmith Snagit for Google Chrome™ http://goo.gl/ySDBPJ

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A first video for teachers setting up a Studio.Code.Org classroom Created with TechSmith Snagit for Google Chrome™ http://goo.gl/ySDBPJ

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Anyone can learn computer science. Make games, apps and art with code.

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We know it's months away, but we're starting to get ready (and excited) for CS Education Week 2018!

Each year, Code.org has kicked off CSEdWeek with a signature event - at the White House, at the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange, with Canada's prime minister, and with the leading women in tech.

Last year, we shared your incredible momentum on the national stage at this event. We had some phenomenal pledges, including many districts committing to bring CS to every student they serve. Having these pledges is often a first step to getting the district to commit to plans for professional development and CS pathways in their school.

We want to again share the spotlight and press attention with you and the districts in your area during this event this year and share your announcements and/or pledge with a focus on broadening participation in computer science.

These announcements represent an opportunity to celebrate a recent achievement or the launch of a new initiative. Pledges represent a clear and measurable goal to expand access and diversity in computer science that includes a specific number of teachers, schools, and/or students who will be engaged. By starting to collect these early, we want to give you plenty of time to begin work on your pledges for the event and also start thinking about the districts you want to work with on pledges. Announcements and pledges should be new and newsworthy. We won't repeat information that has been previously shared publicly.

Please complete this form by November 2nd to submit an announcement and/or pledge to be considered for the 2018 CSEdWeek kickoff event. See examples of pledges and announcements from last year here.

Thank you for your support of computer science education!

As the school year winds down and summer quickly approaches, we want to say thank you to all of the teachers who brought CS Fundamentals to their classrooms this year! Whether you tried just a few lessons or did an entire course, you are providing your students an incredible opportunity to experience how fun, creative, and empowering computer science can be.

Throughout the year, we receive lots of great feedback on how we can improve the CS Fundamentals courses. Our curriculum team at Code.org has been hard at work making improvements that will be broadly available on July 2nd in preparation for the 2018-2019 school year. The 2017-18 version of the course will still be available, but we will be recommending the new version of the course on the website and to new teachers. We have made some small changes to individual lessons, but want to give you an overview of larger changes to the course.

Course B updates

For our initial launch of Courses A-F for this school year, Courses A and B followed a very similar progression. While Course B took each concept deeper than Course A, we received feedback that teachers expected these to be more different from each other. This is important, especially as students move from Course A this year into Course B next school year - we want computer science to feel fresh and fun every time they do it!

So now, Course B has some new lessons at the start of the course. A teacher favorite from Course 1, Happy Maps, is now in Course B but with some important modifications to emphasize the role of persistence in solving problems. We've also added new programming lessons for teaching the concepts of sequencing and loops and integrated a new lesson from our partners at Copyright and Creativity to help students recognize when their work has been inspired by the work of others.

Course D updates - more loops!

In the 2018-19 version of Course D, there will be two new lessons focused on simple loops to help students more smoothly ramp up to the concept of nesting loops. This will be a great review for students who have already done Course C, and will also help students who are starting with Course D.

Introducing Sprite Lab for Courses E and F

Courses E and F both culminate in end-of-course projects where students can unleash their creativity and apply the skills they've learned throughout the course into a project of their own design. In the 2017-18 version of the course, students could choose to make a project in either Artist or Play Lab. Due to some technical limitations in Play Lab, it has been difficult and sometimes buggy for students in Course E and F to combine more advanced concepts such as variables, for loops, and conditionals. To address this, and create an environment with an even higher ceiling and more possibilities for students, we have designed a new environment called Sprite Lab!

Like Play Lab, Sprite Lab makes it easy and fun for students to create characters (called 'sprites'), give them behaviors, and add interactions to make games and scenes come to life.

There will now be three lessons at the end of each course to get students familiar with creating their own projects in the Sprite Lab environment. We're confident that both teachers and students will be able to quickly get started with Sprite Lab, and we can't wait to see what students create!

We're excited about all of these changes, and we couldn't have done it without the feedback that teachers sent our way. Please keep sharing your feedback with us by writing to us at support@code.org or by posting on the forum!

We wish you a fantastic wrap up to your school year and a restful and fun summer!

Now that the AP exam is in the past and teachers hopefully have a moment to catch a breath, we wanted to celebrate all of the amazing work that our CS Principles teachers and students have done this year. We've loved hearing classroom stories, seeing student work, and getting so much great feedback throughout the year. We're particularly excited to announce some of the updates that you'll see in the upcoming 2018-2019 version of CS Principles.

Going forward, when we release curriculum updates, new versions of our courses will be available alongside past versions. This means that while the 2018-19 version of the CS Principles course will become recommended on June 4th, anyone still teaching the course will be able to continue using the 2017-18 version without interruption.

Performance Task Preparation

When we talked to teachers last year their single most requested update was more opportunities to prepare students for the performance tasks. We've added a number of features to do just that:

Updated PT Prep Units: Over the course of the 2017-2018 school year we released entirely updated PT prep materials. We split a single PT prep unit into separate Explore PT Prep and Create PT Prep units and entirely rewrote the materials within them. These refreshed units feature more robust resources to help students and teachers better understand task requirements and guide them through completing the task. In the 2018-2019 version, we've also formalized our recommendation that classrooms complete the Explore PT after Unit 4 and complete the Create PT after Unit 5.

Refreshed projects: Projects throughout the curriculum have been updated to match the latest performance task scoring guidelines better. In most cases, the project itself is largely unchanged, and only the language or rubrics have been updated.

A few more significant changes are noted below:

Unit 2 Lesson 5 "Encode an Experience" replaced with a "Format Showdown" research activity to more closely mirror Explore PT skills.

Unit 4 Lesson 9 "Practice PT Big Data and Cybersecurity Dilemmas" has been made optional in light of our updates to other projects in this unit as well as our addition of the Explore PT Prep unit.

Unit 5 Lesson 18 "Practice PT Create Your Own App" has also been made optional, since we updated other projects in this unit and added the Create PT Prep unit.

PT-style questions incorporated throughout the course: Units 3, 4, and 5 in particular now feature more frequent and explicit examples of the Performance Task language. Many lessons in these units now include at least one PT-style assessment question, as well as guidance for teachers on how to use them.

Pacing

Data analysis to post-AP: Based on feedback from teachers, we've moved some lessons that explicitly focus on learning data analysis skills with spreadsheets to the Post-AP unit of the curriculum. These lessons were previously part of Unit 2 Chapter 2 of the course. We estimate this shift will give teachers roughly 2 weeks of class time back prior to the AP exam.

Data visualization to Unit 4: Two lessons that focused on interpreting data visualizations (previously Unit 2 Lessons 8 and 9) were moved to Unit 4 of the curriculum.

Unit 1 clarified: We know that pacing can be particularly tricky early in the year, so we have made targeted improvements to lessons in Unit 1 to better highlight the goals of the lessons and when it's appropriate to move on.

Tools Updates

Teacher feedback: One of our most common requests from teachers is to allow more effective teacher feedback on programming projects. All programming levels will now include a tab where teachers can provide feedback to their students!

We're really excited about these changes, and we couldn't have done it without our teachers and their insightful feedback. The CSP curriculum guide has been updated with these new changes. Please keep sharing your feedback by writing to us at support@code.org or by posting on the forum!

Thanks for all the great work you do, and we hope you have a great end of the school year and a restful summer!

The curriculum team at Code.org has been hard at work getting the next iteration of CS Discoveries ready for the 2018-2019 school year based on feedback from our first full year of implementation. We've been absolutely amazed to see all of the experiences teachers are creating for their students, and we hope you're all as excited as we are about the year to come!

Going forward, when we release curriculum updates, new versions of our courses will be available alongside past versions. This means that while the 2018-19 version of the CS Discoveries course will become recommended on June 4th, anyone still teaching the course will be able to continue using the 2017-18 version without interruption.

More support for differentiation

We're encouraged to see how many different ways teachers are using CS Discoveries, but we realize that we need to be more flexible about the needs of different classrooms and students. We've added a few things to the course that we think will help teachers better adapt the materials to their needs.

The "Help & Tips" tab: In many programming activities throughout the course, you'll notice a new tab at the top of the instructions titled, "Help & Tips." This new tab provides students with additional resources and tips that they can use to learn more about concepts addressed in the activities. This tab may include supporting videos, descriptions of how to use a given concept, or links to documentation for specific blocks. We've started by adding this tab to some key lessons in Units 2 and 3, but we'll continue to add resources as we create them.

Lesson extras: When students reach the end of a programming lesson, we usually leave them in a "free play" area to continue working, but many of you have given us feedback that students want more direction to challenge them. Units 3 and 6 now include Lesson Extras, which allow a student to select from a number of additional specific challenges once they reach the end of a lesson. You can turn on Lesson Extras when assigning a new unit, or by clicking "Edit Section Details" from the teacher dashboard.

Unplugged differentiation: Many unplugged lessons now have additional teaching tips to point out specific alternate choices a teacher might make to best fit their students' needs, whether for students who already have experience with a similar activity or those who may need some additional scaffolding to be successful.

Assessment and feedback

A big focus for us in the coming year will be improving our support for teachers to assess student learning. While you can expect more in this area in the future, we've already done some work to better support teachers.

Reworked rubrics: All of our rubrics have been updated to better align to the appropriate unit-wide goals and student outcomes.

Teacher feedback: One of our most common requests from teachers is to allow more effective teacher feedback on programming projects. All programming levels will now include a tab where teachers can provide feedback to their students!

Semester 2 (Units 4-6) updates

We rolled out large-scale updates to Units 4-6 earlier this year in response to our Spring 2017 pilot (you can find details about those updates on the forum). As those units are just now being used in the classroom, we're still waiting on teacher feedback to make any necessary changes. We're keeping an eye on how these units are working in classrooms through the end of the year, and we may incorporate small changes in the summer.

That's it for the major changes that will impact the 2018-2019 version of the course. The CSD curriculum guide has been updated with these new changes.

We can't wait to see the amazing things you all do with CS Discoveries in your classrooms - please keep sharing your feedback by writing to us at support@code.org or by posting on the forum!

At Code.org, we love encouraging students to explore their creativity and create amazing projects using code. And at the same time, we're big proponents of privacy, so we don't give students access to the tools that allow them to upload their own content unless they are over the age of 13 or are inside a teacher's classroom.

We've now added an additional privacy feature that teachers have been waiting for - the ability for teachers to control exactly which students can or cannot share App Lab, Game Lab, and Web Lab projects. We also made sure that students under the age of 13 default to not being able to share these projects with anyone but their Code.org teachers.

Teachers can manage which students can share these projects through the "Manage Students" section of your teacher dashboard. If you have CS Discoveries or CS Principles assigned to your section, you should see a "Sharing" column. If you don't have these courses assigned, you will be able to show this column through the settings button in the "Actions" column.

To learn more about how to use this setting, check out our support article on this topic.

The US Department of Education just invited applications for the Supporting Effective Educator Development Program (SEED). The notice prioritizes support for K-12 computer science and gives members of the computer science community the opportunity to apply for this funding. It also means that the Department needs peer reviewers with CS knowledge to evaluate grant applications.

The Department has asked the computer science community to help them grow their pool of grant proposal reviewers to include individuals with expertise in computer science education. The Department has never had a focus on computer science before. Having members of the community become peer reviewers gives the field a unique opportunity to be part of the merit-based determination of winning applications.

What kind of people are they looking for? The Education Innovation Research grant program recently said they are looking for:

Persons who are school principals or other school leaders (such as curriculum coordinators or coaching specialists), teachers, district leaders, foundation officers, university faculty (who work with schools), researchers, evaluators, professional development providers, or other individuals who have significant and current K-12 education experience.

Ideally, persons who have administrative, project management, or some other leadership experience which helps them to bridge their understanding of what happens in the classroom with what it takes to implement, sustain, and grow new educational programs.

Persons who are interested in identifying what is new or innovative nationally in K-12 education, and in determining how those innovations can be successfully evaluated, scaled, and disseminated.

Persons who have direct K-12 experience and expertise in at least two of a number of content areas, including STEM, professional development, teacher preparation, vocational education, and program evaluation, among others.

Persons who are excellent writers, good critical thinkers, and committed to completing assigned tasks in a professional and timely manner.

Interested? Good!
The EIR program has asked those interested in reviewing proposals to send a copy of their resume to EIRpeerreview@ed.gov. You can also register and submit your resume in "G5" to be eligible to review EIR, SEED, and any other programs that need computer science expert reviewers. (It is recommended that you consult these PowerPoint instructions.) ED will compensate you for the time you spend reviewing applications.
One note of caution
You won't be able to be a reviewer if you will be applying to the competition, if you'll be involved in the preparation of a grant application, or if you would benefit from an application that would receive funding. The Department has safeguards to prevent these conflicts.
We hope you'll consider this opportunity
ED will be announcing new grant competitions in coming weeks and months, and we want them to have the computer science experts they need to fund the best applications they receive.

This morning between 5:55 and 6:05am and 8:05 and 8:50am PST, part of Code.org's site experienced a slowdown or outage. The root cause of this was an increased error rate in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 service which affected numerous other websites in addition to Code.org. AWS provides more details in their update below.

Students who were logged on before the outage were unable to save their work during the outage. We apologize for the inconvenience to our students and teachers, and we will continue to work hard to ensure Code.org is working great all the time for everyone. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to support@code.org.

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We know it's months away, but we're starting to get ready (and excited) for CS Education Week 2018! Each year, Code.org has kicked off CSEdWeek with a signature event - at the White House, at the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange, with Canada's prime minister, and with the leading women in tech.