What students experience
When students sign in to CS First, they:
- Arrive at their dashboard/My Classes page. Here they can see their current classes and any lessons that are assigned to them. They can also access their projects as well as their profile.
- Students click on an assigned lesson and arrive on the lesson overview. The overview will give them a brief introduction to the lesson. Below the overview, the lesson is broken down into a list of its activities to give students a sense of what is to come.
- Students click the blue start button to begin the lesson
- For text based lessons, students will move into the Scratch for CS First editor and text will appear, guiding them through the lesson
- For video based lessons, students will be prompted to watch a video and the video will direct them to navigate to the Scratch for CS First editor, which will open in a new tab
- Students can return to the lesson overview by clicking the unit and lesson links above a video. They can return to their class dashboard by clicking My dashboard.
- As students watch videos, their progress is tracked on their dashboard, including the last lesson viewed and their projects from the editor, to help students pick up where they left off.
How to test the CS First experience as a student
In order to experience CS First as a student, you'll need to do the following:
- First, sign in as a teacher to create a test class. Instructions for setting up a class.
- Note: We recommend selecting CS First accounts as the option for how students sign in in order to test the experience as a student. This will ease account confusion for when you're ready to use CS First as a teacher.
- Once your class is created, click on the People tab (to the right of Units).
- Click on the + Add students button.
- Add your test student name (ex: "Test Student Account") into the corresponding field and click Create accounts & download roster. A .csv file will automatically download which will contain the test student account information.
- Important! Open the .csv file and take note of the username and password for the test student account.
- Click Done when the confirmation prompt appears showing you've successfully created an account. You should now see the new student account added to your list of students on the People tab of your class.
- Important! Next, write down your class code, which is located to the right of your class title and should be a combination of six numbers and letters (ex: 9t9dsb).
- Click on the Units tab and click on + Add units.
- Select a lesson of your choice and click Add to your class and follow the additional prompts.
- Next, to sign out of your teacher account, click on Teacher in the top right corner and select the option to Sign out, which should return you to the CS First homepage.
- Now, to sign in to your test student account, click Sign in in the top right corner then select I am a student on the next page.
- Click the option to Sign in with CS First.
- Enter the class code that you wrote down in Step 7.
- Enter the student username and password you were issued in Step 5 and click Sign in.
- You should be directed to your CS First student dashboard and see the test class you created.
- Click on the assigned unit to begin using CS First as a student. Don't forget to sign out of your test student account when you're ready to sign back in to your teacher account.