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March 03, 2020 by Josh Feinsilber

Classes and Reports have been a core part of Gimkit for a long time.

Classes launched just a month or two after the initial launch for Gimkit as a solution to prevent naughty names. It's since expanded to be a core part of Assignments and the foundation for Seasons.

Reports have been in Gimkit since the very beginning, although it's changed significantly in that time. In the first version of Gimkit, you could see a basic report at the end of the game, but once you closed the tab, the report was gone. Then, we kept reports in your Gimkit account in PDF format. Finally, when we launched Gimkit 4.0 back in September, we made reports interactive and easy to navigate.

Today's improvements take things up a notch, not only making Classes and Reports core parts of Gimkit, but two of its strongest parts. There's a lot that's new here, so let's dive in.

Classes V2 brings student accounts to Classes. Instead of entering in the names of each student, you'll share a link with them to join! Each student will need to have a free student Gimkit account. They can register with an email + password, or register with Google.

Once students visit the link, they will automatically request to join your Class! You can accept or reject their invite under the Invites tab.

And that's it! That's all you need to do to get students in your Class! With that, you'll get access to a whole bunch of exciting improvements to Gimkit!

The name of the student you accepted when they joined your Class is their name! No need to worry about a student entering in an inappropriate name! Also, you can edit their name within Classes if you need to.

Since Classes V2 is tied to student accounts, that means we check to make sure each student is logged in and in your Class before they join the game. That means that nobody can select the name of another student and nobody outside of your class will be able to join the game!

Same as before, using Classes lets you use Seasons as well and gain some extra features for Assignments. With Assignments, you'll be able to see exactly who did and didn't complete each assignment. Additionally, students are able to leave an assignment and pick back up where they left off at a later date!

Oh...we almost forgot the most exciting new addition with Classes V2...

When you use Classes V2, students will be able to join your game by just visiting gimkit.com/play — that's it. No entering in a game code. No entering in their name. Just gimkit.com/play and you're in. It feels like magic.

For this feature to work, the student will need to be logged into their Gimkit account when they visit gimkit.com/play — if they're not, once they enter the game code, they'll be asked to login.

We're super excited to see how much class time this will save - no more waiting for students to enter in the code and select their name!

By bringing in student accounts with Classes, we've unlocked so many amazing things. However, we know not every class can have students create their own accounts. We're keeping support for all of the Classes you've already created, and we're also going to continue to allow you to create Classes using the old version of Classes, where students select their name from the list.

As of today, almost everything annoying and frustrating about reports is gone! We've spent a lot of time making Reports more stable and reliable, and we're bringing Reports to more areas of Gimkit. Let's take a look!

💾 Auto-saved Reports

You heard it, Reports now auto-save. What does this mean? Well, if you're hosting a game and get disconnected, or close the tab, or something goes wrong, that data isn't lost. You get a report for every game you host, even if you don't reach the end.

🤲 Everyone's in

If a student leaves the game early, they are now also included in the Report! All the questions they answered, money earned, everything is right there, even if they're not there for the end of the game.

📝 Reports for Assignments

We're expanding Reports to not just live games, but assignments too! Every assignment created from here on that is assigned to a Class will have a report attached to it. Take a look at that Report to get all the information you get from a live game Report! That means the student breakdown, question breakdown, and individual student reports.