Getting Started with Tynker

Getting started with Tynker. Introductions. My name is David Marino. I'm your account specialist here at Tynker. In the chat will be Vera Bentley Gonzalez. She will be there to answer your questions and provide you with any information you may need. So without any further ado, let's just hop right into it. All right, so let's get connected. First we're going to start this off with an activity. Just a little icebreaker. Cody wants to ask you, what are the grade levels you work with? If anybody cares to answer in the chat or just with your mic, feel free.

All right, that's okay. Maybe the next question. So where in the world are you joining us from? From Jordan. Oh, awesome. It's a pleasure to have you here. That's really cool. Elementary school in Virginia. Excellent. Love to see it. Fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth. That's perfect. We have a lot of new classes in that grade range. Iowa middle school and elementary school in Kuwait. I had a meeting with Kuwait for a PD session. The time difference from Chicago is about nine hours. That was a good one to coordinate. Incredible. Thank you everybody for your input. That's so interesting. Well, it's a pleasure to meet you.

All right. I'm going to progress to the next slide now. So to get started, what is Tynker? Tynker offers a complete kid-friendly environment for learning computer programming from block-based coding for beginners to real world languages like Python and JavaScript. So what does that all mean? In our system, we have block and text coding. We have comprehensive curriculum, science, technology, engineering, and math courses, automatic assessments, classroom management, and professional development. And we're working on an all-new professional development membership. So you heard it here first. Feel free to ask questions about that afterwards or send me a message or schools at Tynker and we'd be happy to elaborate.

Tynker empowers kids to be makers. What does that mean? We have robotics, augmented reality, and more. Science, technology, engineering, and math, and project-based learning. That's very hands-on activities. Students get invested. They create their own things. It's very involved for ever-shrinking attention spans. So it's really important that we keep kids engaged and excited and that's the main goal for that. We do have data science and AI, very in style right now. We have a lot of new AI curriculum in data science and so it gets students ready for the future for developments and gets them ready to experience all of that in a very moderated and safe way. Of course we have text coding offerings and then we have icon and block coding.

We sent out some surveys and we figured out what teachers like. We're trusted by 150,000 schools. These are the main things just to get some ideas out there. Teachers usually like our block and text coding. It's very strong in the Tynker platform. They love our comprehensive curriculum, integrative STEM and ELA and SS courses. That's English language arts and social studies. We have automatic assessments, classroom management, and professional development all built into the site. So it'll be at your fingertips to use whenever you see fit. We're available on web and mobile platforms. That's computer, iPad, Chromebook, and we have a Tynker app and the Tynker Junior app.

What do the students like? See, this is pretty important because they're the ones who are going to be using our platform. Students really love the gamified rewards and progression. That's a huge priority to Tynker. We really try to make things very flashy, animated, and gamified. Students can learn a lot of computer science, they can get their education, but also have a lot of fun doing it. We also have certificates. When somebody completes something, they get some validation for doing that work and they can store them and compare them. It's a lot of fun and we find students really feel a sense of pride and accomplishment when they complete a lesson and get those certificates.

We have visual Lego style coding. How this works is basically like Legos. You can stack coding blocks and they're going to have logic built into them and you're able to build a sort of Lego sculpture out of your code. This really interfaces well with the way kids learn. It's a very playful way to learn computer science and we find this works very well with our students at Tynker. We have a lot of visual effects. We place a huge emphasis on making things very beautiful and animated and flashy and colorful. Every lesson will communicate this. It's our style and we find students really love to engage with the platform when our courses look like this.

We also really promote creative freedom with Tynker. We want to really get those creative juices flowing with our students. We have projects and we have all sorts of customization. You can customize your stage, the setting that your code takes place in, and your character, which is your costume. We have lots of partnerships. You can be anything from a Hot Wheels car to Barbie. That creative freedom really fosters a sense of growth and learning with our students while making it very fun. We also have remixing projects. If you make a project in Tynker, you can make it accessible to other people. You can send them your projects or you can post it to our gallery. It's a great way to really show off some of the incredible things our students are able to do in a safe and moderated setting because we do moderate it. We keep an eye on it to make sure it's all appropriate. That's how students can show off what they've been working on and get some feedback and generate some more ideas for kids who are looking to do the same thing.

Computer science teaching resources from Tynker. In Tynker, we have 10 pre-reader courses in the Tynker Junior app and in the web browser. We find this is best for K to 2. Our young kids really love the animation, the gamified learning experience, and it's accessible all across the board from web browser to app. Next, we have 31 block coding courses. That's going to be that Lego style of coding. We have lots of curriculum offering that style across different projects and languages. That'll be an excellent way to explore that in that fun toy-based learning style. We have 500 hour of code challenges. Hour of Code is a condensed 45-minute to an hour project that we create and it incorporates a lot of our partnerships. It's a great way to get those ever-shrinking attention spans engaged. It's all packed into that short span of time and in that you're completing a game. You're achieving a project goal and there's a solid beginning to end. We find that a lot of students benefit from having that sort of end in sight and they get engaged and invested in finishing.

In addition, for more advanced students we have 11 text coding courses which are going to be the best ways to learn our text coding languages. It really has the same sort of logic that we put in all of our classes: very gamified, very flashy, just geared towards more text-based coding. We have 400 plus DIY projects which really encourage creativity. These will be templates and you can use them to create projects that are all physics-based. You can bounce a ball, launch things, or balance things. It's all going to be physics-based like we see in a lot of video games nowadays. It incorporates that same sort of logic but you're in complete control and you can influence what characters or objects you move. Once again, it incorporates that STEM computer science learning into it.

We also have 12 STEM courses for 3rd to 8th grade and these are going to be our built-out STEM curriculum covering all the bases in terms of science, technology, engineering, and math. We also have six electives: micro:bit, augmented reality, and AI. These will be AI-based physical coding, a great way to safely teach children about AI and AR. These are condensed lessons where it's not exactly like a chatbot out in the wild west like we see on the internet, but we show children what machine learning is and we give them projects to complete. We incorporate it safely in our system to have a learning-based experience with our AI machine learning.

Here is our CS teaching and resources page that provides a wealth of resources for teachers. You'll be able to see this on all of your dashboards. We have a video library, getting started guides, quick tips, coding languages, pedagogy, creative topics, a help center, and frequently asked questions. When you navigate your dashboard, you'll be able to access this page and have a vast wealth of resources at your fingertips.

All right, getting into the meat and potatoes: teaching your first lesson. We start by setting up a class. When you log in, this is what it's going to look like on your end. You're going to see your classes and an "add classroom" button. This is going to be your main hub for accessing your classrooms, adding curriculum, and viewing your students. The teacher dashboard is used to create classes, manage students, assign lessons, and track progress. It's a tile-based system that is very organized and visible.

How do we find the right content for our students? We have a course catalog and curriculum maps. These show us all of the information we need to access and assign these courses. It shows us what standards there are, the scope and sequence, answer keys, and course overviews. Everything you need to effectively distribute this curriculum and teach it will be available through this page. It is an organized system that's right in front of you, easy to find and available. We have curriculum maps for K to 2 and for elementary and middle school. These are built out for your reference to set you up for success and give you all the information you need to teach effectively.

What's new at Tynker? We've added the "toggle off games" button. We found that some schools really benefit from having a toggle to turn on and off games instead of having a set time. The gamified aspect will be available, but you'll be in control of it. You can disable games for students or always allow them. Of course, we have the archive classroom and delete classroom functionality as well. Additionally, we have a world-class curriculum team working on weekly projects. They're available in Tynker blocks in either JavaScript or Python. Here is our most recent offering for Earth Day. This allows students to plant trees with code and spread environmental awareness. Encourage them to be creative and publish their best creations to the classroom gallery. Before this, we had a cupcake prank for April Fool's Day and some Winter Olympics projects. We keep it topical and contemporary for student investment.

Our curriculum is scenario-driven, fun, engaging, self-paced, and no experience required. Our curriculum team puts a lot of emphasis on making these lessons contained and able to be taught by anybody, even students. We have tutorials built into these classes and they can be accessed and used by anyone. They're very accessible and we make it easy to read with visual examples. You can move at your own pace. We have fast flyers that can zoom through and extra help for those who may be struggling. If you have a teacher who is not well-versed in computer science who has to sub, we designed this platform for them to be able to use it as well as advanced teachers.

Our grade book is a very important feature. You see lesson progress, quizzes, concept mastery, standards, and attendance. It is all listed there at your fingertips and we have a color-coded system to visualize everything at a high level. You see what's in progress, completed, or not started yet. You can see who is doing a great job and who might need some extra attention. It's an invaluable tool where you'll be able to view the progress of every student at a quick glance.

How do we get support with Tynker? If you'd like more training, you can go to tynker.com/training. If you need support, the schools email is active and you'll get a response very quickly. Feel free to ask any questions or ask for a meeting and we'll be happy to get you up and running.

If you all would like to log into your Tynker accounts, I'm going to show you my dashboard. I have high school AP CSP and fourth grade block coding. Let's say I want to focus on a specific classroom. I can access the grade book, quizzes, concept mastery, standards, and attendance. This is where I access my students to add them or add guardians. It's fully accessible to sort and manipulate. If I wanted to add something data science geared, I’d go to my plan. I can sort by grade, subject, platform, and device. Here we have Data Science 1. I can access the course overview tool to get a comprehensive rundown, including lesson plans, presentations, and student views. We also have answer keys accessible here.

I’m going to assign Data Science to my classroom. A really cool feature is that we can assign all the lessons, or if we find our students are already skilled and we want to skip to specific lessons, we can completely customize it that way. Once assigned, students will be able to access these lessons immediately.

I also want to show you the admin tab. You will all have access to this. Always look for the gear icon. This is the hub for all your admin tools. You can view your licenses and see what you have access to. There is a teachers section and a students section for school admins. Our resources tab is where you’ll see quick tips, getting started guides, and pedagogy topics. You can get a dashboard tour and find videos on student usernames, importing students, and lesson assignments. These videos are built to be extremely intuitive.

Our coding languages section follows the same concept with resources for Tynker Blocks, Python, and intermediate coding. Our pedagogy section includes College Board resources for AP computer science and building inclusive classrooms. We also have creative topics like NASA collaborations and building a community of makers. There is an Hour of AI tab with projects that incorporate AI safely through machine learning. For example, students can use a camera to track hands or eyes to control the weather or interface with a monster. My favorite is Turtle Racer where you track your hands to drive a turtle around the screen.

The projects tab is where you go to create custom, free-form projects. We have templates for game design, art, music, STEM, AI, Python, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and Java. You can make your own projects to send to students or students can make and share their own. It really encourages creativity across any discipline. That’s pretty much the platform: classrooms, curriculum, projects, resources, and admin. If you have questions, reach out to schools at Tynker. We are very grateful for our customers and look forward to seeing the amazing things you create.